The Gnome Panel

I’ve been a Gnome user for most of my time with Linux. Despite the occasional foray into the world of KDE, I always seem to return to the land of the familiar. I’ll even concede that, for now, KDE seems to be winning the Desktop Environment War. That may not be the case for long, with the release of a completely update Gnome scheduled for this year.

Despite KDE’s popularity, I know from your mail that many of you are, in fact, using Gnome. Today, we’ll walk through one of the handier features of Gnome, the Gnome Panel.

The Gnome Panel has three major components: the apps launcher, the desk guide and the tasklist. The apps launcher is located along the bottom left edge of the panel. By default, it contains the main menu, a terminal emulator, the Gnome control panel, and the Netscape browser. You can add your own quick launch buttons to the apps launcher by right-clicking and selecting panel, add to panel, launcher or launcher from menu. If you choose the latter, you’ll see the start menu. From there you can choose your own selection of panel apps.

The desk guide is a graphical representation of your virtual desktops, complete with the outline of each open window in each desktop. Select a desktop simply by clicking on it.

The tasklist is much like the taskbar in Windows. It provides button-like representations of the minimized windows residing in your selected desktop. Click on an app in the tasklist and the window will open. Both the desk guide and tasklist are completely configurable by right-clicking and selecting properties.

Where is your panel? Is it on the bottom, the side, or the top? It can be any of those places - depending on your preference. In the current version of Gnome, that choice is as simple as a right-click on any blank area on the panel. Select panel, properties and type to choose from an edge panel, aligned panel, sliding panel, or floating panel.

Need news? You can have that in the panel as well. Another right click, select Applets, Network, and Slash App. Voila - it’s scrolling Slashdot headlines directly to your desktop, updating automatically.

You can even add a pet, if you’d like. Wanda the Gnome Fish is an applet that can be added to the panel. With a mouse click, she’ll confer upon you words of wisdom drawn directly from the fortune program available on most Linux systems.

The Gnome panel is flexible and convenient. More important to me is this - in all the years I’ve used Gnome, I’ve never had a panel crash.

A foot on one end, a fish on the other. There really can’t be any question you’re using Gnome.