When I logged into the machine today, I was shocked to see no panel appearing on the ubuntu desktop. I thought the computer has hung. But when I right clicked the desktop, I got the regular pop-up menu and was able to change desktop wallpapers.

Here is what I did to get the panel back. With the desktop without the panel and not remembering any of the shortcuts, it was quiet difficult.

First, I created a launcher for Terminal. Right Click on any area on the desktop and then choose ‘Create Launcher’. Choose any name and then in the command text box, type in

terminal

This should create a terminal launcher. That done, double click to open a terminal session. Enter the following command,

killall gnome-panel

Then right click on the desktop to create another launcher. This time in the command text box, type in

gnome-panel

This creates a gnome-panel launcher. Double click and viola! you have the Panel.

Starting out on the Open Source fever, I installed Mandriva, Suse and finally have settled with Ubuntu after two days of fighting over which distribution to go with. But Ubuntu doesn’t ask a lot of questions during install, about what to install and where to install grub etc.

After installing Ubuntu, I saw that it had not even install gcc libraries but had installed the gcc compiler. Also, the default operating system to boot into was ‘Ubuntu’ instead of Windows XP. As I and my friends use the same machine and they have no liking to Linux, I needed Windows to boot first. During the installation, I was not provided the option to choose.

I wanted to change the default boot option in grub. I had to edit the ‘menu.lst’ file located in /boot/grub manually. It does not allow to edit as the permissions for the only user was denied. The concept of ‘root’ user was not there, as I was not requested for the creation of a root user. I just created a user, and ubuntu assigns super user privilege to this user.

To switch users, the ‘sudo’ command was to be used instead of ‘su’.

Finally, all set and working. Still to install ruby, mysql, python, vlc.