GNOME panels misbehaving

[Andre Costa]

Hi Tim,

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 00:41, Tim <ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-07-16 at 20:34 -0300, Andre Costa wrote:
>> I just installed F9[*] and I am experiencing some weird behavior: I
>> like to swap GNOME panels, leaving the one with the window list applet
>> at the top, and the one with the menu at the bottom. It works fine
>> while my session is running, but if I log out and then back in, the
>> panel with the menu (which should be at the bottom) is stuck at the
>> top, right below the other (that should indeed be at the top). If I
>> try to change its position to "bottom", it simply refuses and stays
>> there...
>
> How are you re-arranging them?  Dragging them about, or right-clicking
> on a panel, opening the properties, and picking the top/bottom/sides
> options?

I am setting the properties, I will try dragging them around to see if
it makes any difference, thks for reminding me of that alternative.

One detail I forgot to mention: the panel with the menu has "expand"
set to off, don't know if this is somehow related...

It seems this is a F9-specific issue, since I am using Ubuntu 8.04
here at work which also has GNOME 2.22.3, and here panels stay where I
tell them to (can't recall what's the exact GNOME version F9 uses).

>> [*] BTW: I simply *hated* the new GDM -- the background is horrendous,
>> and I don't like the user chooser panel.
>
> Can't say I like it, either.  The background's easily replaceable, but
> the rest isn't so easy to deal with.  I'd rather just type in username
> and password, than have a list of things showing that I don't want
> showing (imagine the mess if you had hundreds of users).  It's also nuts
> at inconsistently default selecting different users, so even a re-login
> of the same user has to cursor arround.  And the slowness between
> picking a user before it lets you type in a password means that touch
> typists have started typing their password before the gadget is
> accepting input.

Yeah, it sucks that we're forced to use this. They should have
provided an option. And I know this is completely subjective, but I
felt sad that F9 has IMHO broken the long-standing tradition of Fedora
having cool backgrounds (the "sulphur" one is much better, it's a
pitty it hasn't been chosen as the default).

> I tried replacing it with XDM, but that doesn't set up something that
> Gnome needs.  I haven't tried replacing it with KDM, I didn't want to go
> down the root of installing KDE, even if only partially.

My feelings exactly. Don't want to install a bunch of KDE libs just to
switch the login manager. I guess we'll have to wait for it to improve
to the point of being fully configurable...

Regards,

Andre