Liking that new fangled Wingpanel we’re all hearing about? Want one of your own? Turn your Gnome Panel in to one!
The trick is to get a floating Gnome panel (the rest is pretty much obvious). Read on!
Step 1. Remove all the panel applets that you don’t want to use – like the menu.
Step 2. Right click the panel, select “Propreties” and on the “General” tab, uncheck the expand option and enable autohide. Now simply drag the panel to the right side of the screen.
Step 3. Now let’s simulate a “floating effect” for the Gnome panel (that means the panel will always be visible but it covers the applications as opposed to when the panel is always visible – when the windows cannot go underneath the panel):
Press ALT + F2 and enter “gconf-editor”, navigate to apps > panel > toplevels and click “panel_0″ or “panel_1″ (it depends on the panel you want to apply this for). Then, modify the “hide_delay” key value to “2147483647″ which is the maximum supported value. This is the panel hide delay which is now set to “2147483647″ so the panel will take around 600 hours to hide (so it’s not really going to hide), thus becoming a “floating panel”.
Posted by technologyunit on January 2, 2011 at 8:18 pm
I did this with my AWN configuration, here .Actually I had been doing to this a long time ago, before wingpanel was ever even being planed. It all started when I installed Ubuntu on my Netbook. A little Asus 701 which has a little 7in screen. I seem to remember using AWN when I was working on it, however it is the same concept.
Posted by excedio on January 2, 2011 at 8:30 pm
That looks really nice.
Posted by Install Wingpanel From PPA « Open Source on January 2, 2011 at 9:01 pm
[...] delete the top panel if you decide to use Wingpanel. You can achieve the same thing by using a Gnome panel or even AWN as a [...]