Ubuntu’s gnome-panel instability workaround
July 15th, 2010 | by jim |I’ve been running Ubuntu 10.04 on my desktop since it came out, and about the only real annoyance I have is that occasionally the gnome-panel scrambles the order of my icons and applets. This is possibly because I keep switching the screen layout between a pair of external screens and the laptop screen itself, just using some scripts that invoke xrandr directly … but it still shouldn’t happen.
My workaround for this is to find the files that are modified when the panel attributes are changed, and put the old ones back! So, I sat in a shell finding current files in ~/.gconf using find -mtime 0 until I’d identified the ~/.gconf/apps/panel directory (not ~/.gconf/apps/panel/applets as I initially thought) as being the place to look. I created a bzr repository in that directory and checked in all the files, and in my .bashrc I just run a quick status check to see if anything has been modified … if it has, I can run bzr revert to put it back!
Sadly just killing and restarting the gnome-panel doesn’t do enough to reset the session, you’ll have to log out completely to get the panel re-organised. Unless gnome-panel listens to a signal like HUP … and I’m not going to test that today!