Resetting gnome panel

How do resetting the gnome panel to the initial state?

The gnome–panel program provides the panels of the the GNOME desktop. The panels are the areas on the desktop that contain, among other items, the applications menu, application launchers, the notification area and the window list. Small applications called applets can also be embedded in the panels.

Gnome–panel Appearance:

By default, GNOME Flashback contains two panels (one on the top, and one to its opposite on the bottom) spanning the width of the screen.

The top panel usually contains navigation menus labeled “Applications” and “Places” in that order, as the “System” menu from GNOME 2.x has been replaced by a control panel in GNOME 3.x. These menus hold links to common applications and areas of the file system, respectively.

A user menu placed on the opposite side of the screen, which has been available since GNOME 2.14 but has become more prominent in GNOME 3.x, holds access to account and system settings as well as options to log out, switch user, and shut down the computer.

The top panel usually contains a clock/calendar and a notification area, which can double as a sort of dock, as well. The bottom panel is commonly empty by default (other than a set of buttons to navigate between desktops) due to its use in the navigation between windows (windows minimize to the bottom panel by default).

Question?

During use, gnome panel applets move and get replaced with the ones users like. After some time the panel becomes so cluttered that it requires a cleanup. The easiest way would be to reset the panel to the original state that it was in after install. Is there an easy way of doing that?

Move the old configuration directory out of the way, and it’ll get reset. Of course, to take effect, you’ll have to restart the panel.

mv ~/.gconf/apps/panel ~/gnome-panel-backup
gnome-panel --replace &

Also other way to resetting gnome panel:

You can reset the panel by running

gconftool-2 --recursive-unset /apps/panel

in a Terminal or by hitting Alt+F2 and pasting this command in the textfield and then hit run. After that gnome-panel needs a restart and therefore it has to be killed with the command

pkill gnome-panel

the same way as the command before. The reset gnome-panel will start again automatically.