In addition to global Panel properties, described in the section called Global Panel Preferences, some properties can be configured
individually for each Panel. This
includes Panel type (Edge,
Aligned, Sliding, Floating), size, location, background color,
and hiding preferences. To change these properties for a
Panel,
click on it with the right mouse button and select
Panel->Properties. You may also
press the Main Menu button and select
Panel->Properties.
From the Properties submenu, you can
choose All properties..., which will
launch the Panel properties dialog. If you
are already familiar with this dialog, you can more quickly
change some of the properties — say,
Panel size or type
— by selecting the appropriate item in the
Properties menu.
The Panel properties dialog contains two
tabs to help you set the active Panel
properties: Edge
Panel (or Aligned, … -
depending on your Panel type) and
Background. Both of these tabs are explained
below.
Panel Position — This changes
the position of the Panel on the screen. For
Edge Panel, you must specify an
edge (Top,
Right, Left or
Bottom). For Aligned
Panel, you have to specify an edge and one of
the edge's ends or the center. For Sliding
Panel, you must specify the edge and offset
from one of the corners (in pixels). Finally, for
Floating Panel you must specify
orientation (horizontal or vertical) and position of
Panel's left top corner (relative
to the left top corner of the screen and measured in pixels).
The Panel will change position once
you have pressed the Apply or
OK button.
Manually Moving a Panel
You can also change Panel
position by dragging it with the middle mouse button to
the new location.
Panel size — Here you can
choose the Panel width. The default
size is 48 pixels, which is
also the default size of icons used by GNOME. Users with low
screen resolution might want to decrease the
Panel size to
free some screen space; conversely, users with high
resolution displays may try using larger
Panel sizes.
Changing Panel size automatically
resizes all the icons on this Panel,
which can lead to some quality loss. Also,
the Panel will ask all the applets to resize
themselves. Most of the applets will comply; however, if
some applets do not obey this request, then the
Panel will resize itself so that it
can fit all the applets.
Hiding — In this section, you
can choose whether you want to Enable
Auto-hide — that is, have the
Panel automatically hide when
the mouse is not over the Panel. The
autohide parameters
can be configured in the Global
Preferences dialog. If you choose to auto-hide, you
might want to disable the hide buttons here as well. You
may also disable the hide button arrows graphics on the
hide buttons.
These options allow you to change the background of the
Panel
itself. You may choose, if you wish, to have the
Standard, Pixmap, or
Color background. The standard look for
the Panel is determined by the GTK theme
you are running at the
time (you can configure the GTK theme using the
GNOME Control Center). The
Pixmap option allows you to choose an
image to tile or scale to the Panel. The
Color option allows you to specify a
particular color for the Panel.
Color to use — If you choose to have
your Panel one color, this button will
launch a dialog which allows you to specify which color to use.
Image — If you wish to have a
Pixmap
for the background of your Panel, this
section of the dialog allows you to choose which image to use.
If you press the Browse button, you can
search for the file you want to use. The current filename is
shown to the left of this button. The window above it shows you
the preview of this background.
Drag and Drop With Images
An easier way to change the background of your
Panel is to
drag and drop an image file from the GNOME
File Manager onto the
Panel. This will automatically
change the background of the Panel to
that image.
Don't scale image to fit — If this
button is checked, the background image will be tiled to cover
the Panel, rather than scaled.
Scale image (keep proportions) — If
this button is checked, the background image will be scaled as
much as possible preserving image's proportions, and then the
scaled image will be used to tile the
Panel.
Stretch image (change proportions) —
If this button is checked, the background image will be
stretched in both dimensions to the size of the
Panel.
Rotate image for vertical panel — If
this button is checked, the image will be rotated when you
change Panel orientation
(horizontal/vertical).