MATE panel gone!

[deviceguru]

I'm not sure what I did, but for some reason all of a sudden the MATE panel on my LMDE 201204 installation vanished from the screen and would not return with rebooting.

I cast about for mate settings on the system, and discovered that if I gave the command "mate-panel" from the command line, the panel comes back. But it's gone again after rebooting.

Based on that, I added the command "mate-panel" as a "Startup Program" using the "Startup Applications Preferences" tool, and that workaround works perfectly. However, I'd prefer to repair the problem at its source.

Suggestions? Thanks!

[cmost]

Sorry, but we'll have to know a bit about what you were doing. Can you explain what you were trying to accomplish when the panel dissappeared? I doubt you were typing a letter and it just vanished before your eyes.

[deviceguru]

I was adjusting various configuration settings when the problem occurred. I realize I erred in not immediately recording what I'd been doing when the problem occurred. It may have occurred when I experimented with having the system boot automatically without password prompting; or perhaps it was when I enabled and configured compiz to see what it would do. I really should have been more careful. My sincere apologies!

At this point I'm interested in finding out what setting to modify, in order not to require the explicit startup script in "Startup Applications Preferences" that serves as my workaround.

Thanks!

[cmost]

Okay, perhaps this will help. There used to be an easy fix that would restore your panels back to their default settings quickly in the bad old days of Gnome 2.x. I've modified that trick to (hopefully) work with MATE.

Open up a terminal and type the following commands:

Code: Select all

mateconftool-2 --recursive-unset /apps/panel
rm -rf ~/.mateconf/apps/panel
pkill mate-panel

Let me know if this succeeds.

[deviceguru]

@cmost, thanks for the suggestion! I'll try that if MATE's panels ever disappear again in the future. But it turns out I just ran into another problem that required me to delete/recreate my primary user account, which resulted in a properly functioning MATE desktop.

FYI, the problem that required me to delete/recreate my user account was that MATE ceased using my Desktop folder and instead pointed to my Home folder for the contents of the displayed desktop. I recall having seen a setting somewhere in GNOME for specifying to use ~/Desktop as the visible desktop, but I couldn't find it anywhere in LMDE. So the only solution was to delete/recreate my user account. What's the trick for fixing the pointer to the Desktop folder in in case of a future mishap?

cheers,
Rick