Completely hide or get rid of Gnome taskbar [SOLVED]

[dberg918]

This has bothered me for months. When the auto-hide option is selected for the Gnome taskbar, it doesn't completely hide it the way it does in KDE and XFCE. There is still a little sliver of desktop space when I maximize windows because of it. Is there a way to completely hide it, or just get rid of the taskbar all together? I've been using Avant-Window-Navigator as my taskbar/app launcher for quite some time and don't need the Gnome panel anymore.

[cmost]

You should be able to right-click the panel and select 'Delete this panel' from the resulting pop-up. Of course this is assuming you're using the two panel arrangement prevalent in Ubuntu or Fedora. This won't work in a default Mint install; if you only have one panel. Fortunately, you can get around this. I, too use Avant-Window-navigator which is absolutely fantastic. It should be part of the default Linux Mint desktop (hint to Clem!!!!) I've set my desktop up to resemble a Mac in that I've moved my primary panel at the top of the screen for some launchers and monitors, as well as the Mintmenu, clock, system tray etc. I've removed the window list applet, leaving AWN to handle that task. Obviously AWN resides at the bottom of the screen. Have a look at my screenshot.

[dberg918]

That looks nice! But still, my goal is to have no taskbar showing. I'd be fine with auto-hiding it at the top, but even when you do that it doesn't completely leave the desktop. To illustrate, I just took a snapshot of my screen. See the little sliver of blue up there? That's the taskbar. It's completely transparent, so it's showing my desktop wallpaper, but that's how much the taskbar sticks out when it hides.

Screenshot.png (105.53 KiB) Viewed 705 times

Again, I don't understand why Gnome's panel is like this, when the Kicker hides completely, and XFCE's does too. You would think that even if you can't get rid of the panel all together, you could at least hide it so you don't have to see it. Then again, I did a google search and it appears that there's a lot of things wrong with the Gnome taskbar besides this.

[dberg918]

For those who are looking for an answer to this problem, I figured out how to fix it. Follow these steps:

1. Press Alt+F2 and type "gconf-editor" (no quotes)
This will bring up the gnome configuration menu
2. Expand the "apps" tree, then the "panel" tree, and finally the "toplevels" tree
3. Highlight "bottom_panel_screen0," and look for the key "auto_hide_size" in the right window
4. Right click "auto_hide_size" key and click "Edit Key..."
5. Change the value to "0"

It seems to work pretty well on my end, though it looks like there still might be a one-pixel wide line still intruding on the top. Much better than it was before, that's for sure.