Gnome Panel

I’ve run into this issue from time to time and I would normally have to reboot.  So; one day I said, “No more!  This is LINUX and I should be able to work around it.”  Oh!? What issue am I talking about?  When your GNOME panel gets stuck and there’s nothing you can do about it!  I’m going to show you how to kill your gnome-panel process and then restart it.  Note that it’s only a temporary solution – I know there’s a better way, but this will do for the time being.

When your GNOME panel goes on the frizz you can kill the process using the “pkill” command.  The only issue with this is once you start the gnome-panel it’s not so stable and it’ll reset to factory defaults.  No worries though once you reboot it will resume to your normal configuation.  So; to kill a mocking bird… ah I mean a gnome panel:

pkill gnome-panel

Reanimate the Panel You Just Killed

After the panel goes away, you then want to bring your Frankenstein back to life.  Open a Terminal window and type “gnome-panel”.  That will start your GNOME panel process.  The only trick with this command is where you execute it.  Since it’s being executed in a Terminal window, you’re bound by it.  If you stop the command or close that terminal, your GNOME panel will go away, again.  After you run the command, simply minimize that Terminal window and go about your business.  JUST TO RESTATE, THIS IS ONLY A TEMPORARY SOLUTION.

Make sure you visit the GnomePanel page for more insight on this very useful module.

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