Daily Archives: October 9, 2010

How to restore the gnome panels to their default state after you mucked them up

Not that you would ever muck them up, but just in case:

Get a terminal somehow (alt+F2 if you must). Type this in:

gconftool-2 –shutdown

or

gconftool –recursive-unset /apps/panel

(or, both if you like)

Then,

rm -rf ~/.gconf/apps/panel

pkill gnome-panel

that sounds like a lot of violence and killing and stuff, but it should work. Both of your panels will reappear like magic. If not, go here and complain because this is where I learned it!

“What use has this company for an electrical toy?”

It is said that these were the words uttered by William Orton, President of Western Union, when given the chance to buy out a 10% share of Alexander Graham Bell’s patents for $100,000. Those patents included those related to the telephone.

A few weeks later, on this day in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Watson carried out the first two-way “long”-distance conversation on a telephone, borrowing for the purpose in-place telegraph line, between Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts. By spring of the next year several additional tests were run over much longer distances, most (but not all) successful. The rest is history.