Thread: Customising the Panel

The panel or the start bar, can be customised by simply dragging and dropping the elements around. The Panel in a desktop environment allows you to gain easy access to programs, manage tasks, keep an eye on the date, keep track of running applications, and adjust settings. The panels in all environments in Linux are entirely customisable. KDE allows you to resize the panel by merely dragging the mouse, a feature that unfortunately, GNOME lacks.

Right click on the panel, and click Add to Panel to add elements to the panel. Depending on the desktop environment, you will get a long list of elements that the particular desktop environment supports. Click on the elements that you want and select add to add to the panel. Not all panel elements are particularly useful, this includes a set of eyeballs or a virtual pet fish.

To move the panel around, just click on it and drag it to any edge of the screen. This allows you to place the panel on top or bot¬tom of the screen as per your preferences. Right click on the panel and click "New Panel" to create another panel on the desktop. This gives you a blank bar that you can modify.



An important element in the panel is the separator, which can be placed between elements so that they don't spill into one another, and organise the panel. To delete a panel, right click on it and select Delete this panel.

To resize the panel in GNOME, right click on the panel, select properties and enter the preferred size of the panel in pixels. The default is 24, which is usually the height of the panel. on the top or bottom edge. From this dialogue, you can set a color for the panel.