Peek-a-boo panel disappears after startup
Several previous discussions provided conflicting descriptions of what works to restore a panel (taskbar ?) that has been lost.
Today a taskbar appeared as if by magic, fully populated and at the top of my desktop, but then disappeared after the system finally (after two tries) accepted my password.
Yesterday a blank panel appeared out of nowhere at the top of my desktop, and I was able to remove it.
The day before yesterday I grew weary of having to reboot the system multiple times in order to start it past the repetitive requests for authorization. I logged out after disconnecting my Think Penguin wifi dongle, but when I logged back in there was no way of reconnecting to the Internet that I could find, because of my blank taskbar.
Previously all the standard stuff had disappeared from that taskbar when I changed the background to transparent.
I remember that back in the good old days of DOS (or Win 3.11 ?) the command prompt would become hidden and inaccessible behind later popup windows. Could that be happening now ? I'll test that theory by making a transparent wallpaper image.
I'm running Trisquel 7 on a Lenovo T420 with 4GB of RAM.
Thanks to Google & The Gimp, I managed to create a transparent wallpaper and it reveals ...
... the usual black screen of startup/shutdown, but with exactly the same icons that I normally see ...
... nothing previously hidden ... no revelation at all.
The good news is that the system can indeed make a usable taskbar, if only in the wrong place and at the wrong time.
Where is there published a procedure to recreate or restore a lost taskbar ?
Solved !
With no clearly established procedure to restore a lost or misconfigured taskbar, I found that the following procedures were ineffectual:
1. Renaming /home/user/.config so it has to be rebuilt on the next restart: that just depopulates the trisquel main menu to its default configuration without changing the Peek-a-boo panel at all.
2. Renaming /home/user/.config/gnome-panel ... no effect.
But the following procedure worked for me in a Trisquel 7 installation:
1. Right click on the existing misconfigured panel and select "add new panel."
2. Right click on the new panel (which appeared at the top of my DE where the Peek-a-boo panel had been) and select the icons you want to add; then close that window so you can see the desired and populated taskbar (still at the top of the DE).
3. Right click on the misconfigured (bottom) panel and select "delete this panel."
4. Right click on the new panel and select its location, "bottom" in my case.
5. Restart, whereupon the Peek-a-boo panel appears yet again at the top of the DE but then disappears after authorization is
(eventually) accepted, to be replaced by the desired new and properly populated taskbar at the bottom of the screen.
I'll accept the brief appearance of the extraneous Peek-a-boo panel as a new and benign feature of my system.
Nevertheless, the "Earth" icon no longer brings up ABrowser (the "connect to network" app. instead) but I can get ABrowser from the classic Trisquel menu.
The lesson learned: Don't delete your taskbar without making a new one first as a precaution.
Solved ... to an extent.
Got my taskbar back up to snuff when I discovered that the "Indicator Applet Complete" is what was missing.
Of course, the peek-a-boo taskbar still dutifully appears until after I enter my password. Not an issue any more.
Further solution: Found out what to call the minimized applications: "Window List" Good grief; this is Trisquel.