Ubuntu: Gnome Hints Tweaks and Tips

Gnome Desktop: How To Remove The Trash Icon

 * 1) Press Alt+F2 then type gconf-editor and hit enter
 * 2) In gconf-editor, navigate to apps > nautilus > desktop
 * 3) On the right side look for the entry called: trash_icon_visible
 * 4) Untick the box and that’s it!

Gnome Panel Top & Bottom Panels Missing At Start Up: How To Restore
If you lose the panels that by default are at the top and bottom of the screen housing such things as menus clock and open programmes, try the following: Linux Terminal:~$ gconftool --recursive-unset /apps/panel rm -rf ~/.gconf/apps/panel pkill gnome-panel

Restart the system and all being well you should have back the Gnome panels, they will however be reset to the original system settings.

This fix was found here after much hunting, so many thanks to the author.

There is a handy little script available to backup your panel settings which can be found here.

Gnome Reset To Defaults
rm -rf .gnome .gnome2 .gconf .gconfd .metacity

Gnome Terminal Tricks
You can set the size of the window and the title and the software it runs, like this...

gnome-terminal --title="Battery" --geometry="50x5" --command "watch acpi -b"

GRUB2 Boot Menu: How To Edit
The quickest way to edit the GRUB2 menu is to use startupmanager, to install in a terminal:

sudo apt-get install startupmanager

After installation the menu entry can be found under 'System --> Administration --> Startup Manager'

For details on manually editing GRUB2 see the Ubuntu page here