Windows Appear Behind Panel in Ubuntu 11.04 – Troubleshooting Guide

11.04panelwindow

When opening new windows in my Ubuntu 11.04 sometimes they are hidden behind the panel. I can grab them while pressing Alt+Button 1 but I would like to solve it so that they appear where they should.

The machine where this is happening is an upgraded one and I have seen in several new installations that this is not the expected behaviour.

You can see it in the following link:

Screenshot of the problem

Best Answer

I had this too on a machine that was all the way upgraded from Intrepid and the problem did not appear for a dummy new user I created for investigation purposes. This is how I solved it:

I logged out of unity, switched to a virtual terminal hitting AltF1, logged in as root, killed all remaining processes from my usual login with killall -u <login>, did a cd /home/<login> and a mv .gconf .gconf-old. When logging back in, the issue had disappeared with a lot of others for the price of losing some configurations which I considered a bargain.

After some diffing .gconf with .gconf-old with meld, I reached at the conclusion that some pre-natty compiz settings were the most probable cause, but your mileage may vary.

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Ubuntu – Will upgrading to 11.04 destroy the current desktop settings

In short, probably not.

Forgetting the desktop, there were a handful of applications that I had installed on a Lucid -> Maverick box that were removed by Natty B1 installation because of missing dependencies. These weren't mainstream applications - most of which are maintained and thus version compatible with the Natty libraries, and none of them were critical to what I do so I don't remember which were removed.

Unlike that other operating system, there isn't the overbearing market need to ensure that your copy of Lotus 1-2-3 from 10 years ago still runs on the new shiny.

If you've got hundreds of users, surely one of them won't miss their computer if you "borrow" it as a sacrifice machine. Failing that, carve off some disk, or get another disk (they are stunningly cheap these days) clone off your config and upgrade the copy to see how insufferable the damage is. It may also be useful in your environment to be able to dual boot Maverick/Natty as needed.

Added: You are asking for a guarantee that only empirical testing can afford you. Ubuntu is such a hypercomplex maze of interdependencies that given a huge static survey of your current installation, I'd be hard pressed to give you a definitive answer to what will change or break. If this wasn't so, you could just upgrade the packages you wanted. But you can't do that without entering dependency hell which the modern distros work so hard at avoiding.

Ubuntu – Unity Panel has wrong icons

I solved this by removing the oxygen-gtk theme.

sudo rm -rf /usr/share/themes/oxygen-gtk/

See Restore GTK integration after removing KDE

Best Answer

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Ubuntu – Unity Panel has wrong icons

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