Ubuntu Tutorials

I’ve been doing a lot of customization lately with my GNOME installation, trying out new layouts and trying to gain as much screen real estate as I can. I came across an issue this morning in regards to the GNOME panel that I wanted to write down / publish. In the short article below I will describe how to completely hide the GNOME panel, allowing your applications to use 100% of the screen.

Autoide.. not 100%

Some of you might be thinking “Just click ‘Autohide” on the panel properties. How hard can it be?” The problem is that the default autohide still displays a few pixels, meaning your applications won’t extend to the absolute edge of the screen. When I tried it initially my panel still took 6px across the top. While that isn’t a lot, it still left a gap and was something I wanted to remove.

I found the value for this change within the gconf-editor. To ensure that your Autohide doesn’t continue to show any pixels (0 pixels), use the following command:

gconftool-2 --set --type integer /apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel_screen0/auto_hide_size 0

You can also find this value in the graphical editor using the following instructions:

ALT-F2 > "gconf-editor" > apps > panel > toplevels > top_panel_screen0 > auto_hide_size > 0

I prefer the command, its much simpler.

There are quite a few more “hidden” settings within the gconf-editor that allow you to change values not held within the normal Properties menu. I’ll have more of these to post in mid-October, after my GNOME presentation is finished for the Utah Open Source Conference.