[By the way, for anyone else who's looking for that and accidentally ends up on this page, the best answer I've seen is to use gconfeditor to set the global lock down, like Matt details as his first red herring above.]

Ben in Seattle

P.S. “Schema” simply describes how a variable can be set and documents it. It’s not a variable, and can’t be set itself. I don’t know why gconfeditor shows schemas by default when you do a search as they’re pretty useless.

To solve this problem only do this:

In ~/.gconf/apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel_screen0/background rename the file “%gconf.xml.new” to “%gconf.xml” and voilá…

All the panel properties are unlocked!

I had deleted the Top Panel all together as far as i remember.
Now this Notification Area thing keeps annoying me, specially on Pidgin and media player alerts both of which are shows up quite often.

I don’t know how it is still showing up.
I am ok with removing the Notification area completely..
Can you (or any visitor) help?

Also I recently got a Laptop and the cursor position gets misplaced at Random when I am typing a Para. Could this be because of this?

By the Way, I have seen a lot of you in the Webspace.
Am glad for the opportunity to interact with you.

I was having a similar issue with Jaunty, but when you mentioned that some developers were thinking about using ALT+drag, I gave it a try and it worked. A pretty acceptable way of preventing accidental moving of the panels I think.

1.Reset GNOME PANELS:
Method 1:
step 1:Get into Terminal
step 2:Just copy&paste this and hit enter after each and every line.
gconftool-2 –shutdown
rm -rf ~/.gconf/apps/panel
pkill gnome-panel
That worked… restored the default setting. Here was the other option, which we didn’t need to try:

Method 2:
Step 1:Get into Terminal.
Step 2:Type in the following command and hit enter
sudo apt-get install gnome-reset
step 3:Run the program,it will give different options.Restore the necessary component.

I was pretty impressed with Dell Customer Service, for whatever that’s worth!
–Joyce

I just had the same problem as you did, and I simply overlooked the Option to enable moving of panels. The message that some options were locked told me nothing; or to be more precise, I thought these options were disabled because of current bugs in the GNOME environment…

Normally I am a shell guy, but now I decided to explore the X-Window environment, especially GNOME. But I still don’t feel comfortable. For example if you copy something with nautilus to an area which belongs to root, how do I do a sudo inside nautilus? Or how do I find files with a certain content? Normally I use (for simple files) find . | xargs grep bla…

Ok. Maybe it will just take some time, but I feel that the Gnome-Environment is putting me into a straight jacket. I wont give up

Greetings Gerry

My world: echo “[la1+dsap10>x]sx0salxx” | dc
Have fun by analysing…

adjust “orientation” from “right” to “top”
Thank you all for sharing.

I managed to fix this with:
gconf-editor
/apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel

adjusted the key named “orientation” to “right” (because I like panels on the right like no holy OS ever enables by default).

so gconf-editor may have been able to help out after all…

Chris