For those who are tired of the top Gnome panel taking up the full length of the screen, you can now try out Wing Panel to free out the extra space. Wing Panel is a panel (created by the Elementary team) designed to show only the indicator-applets and session applet. It is a small panel tucked itself at the top-right hand corner of your screen and it floats above all other windows, freeing up the extra space at the top of your screen.

To install it in your system (Ubuntu Maverick),

Note: This is not the official PPA for WingPanel, but some kind soul who has created it for us to use.

To get it running, press “Alt + F2” and type wingpanel.

At the moment, WingPanel is very minimal and doesn’t come with any configuration option. It will display whatever indicator-applets you have placed on your Gnome panel, but it doesn’t allow you to add/remove any applets. Nor does it comes with an option to exit the app. This is still an initial release, so I believe all the above will be ironed out in the future.

Making your Gnome panel behaves like the Wing Panel

As mentioned above, while the concept of WingPanel is nice, it is still not very usable at the moment. Those who like the concept can improvise and implement it with the Gnome panel. Here’s how:

  1. Other than the applets in your system tray (the right side of the Gnome panel), remove everything else from the panel (right click and select Remove From Panel).

  2. Right click on the Gnome panel and select “Properties”. Uncheck the “Expand” box and check the “Autohide” box. Click Close.

  3. Drag the Gnome panel to the far right corner.

  4. Press “Alt+ F2” and type gconf-editor.

  5. Go to “apps -> panel->toplevels” and select your panel configuration. Look for the ‘hide_delay’ in the options and change the value to anything large enough. The maximum value you can give is 2147483647 (in milliseconds that equals to almost 600 hours).

That’s it. Your Gnome panel should look like the WingPanel now, with the exception that it is fully configurable.

via Justin Stories

Damien Oh started writing tech articles since 2007 and has over 10 years of experience in the tech industry. He is proficient in Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and iOS, and worked as a part time WordPress Developer. He is currently the owner and Editor-in-Chief of Make Tech Easier.

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