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by **earpop** » Tue Mar 20, 2012 2:57 pm

I had to remove and reinstall Evolution and when I selected to have it removed Synaptic also said gnome panel had to be removed along with it. Couldn't understand why this was necessary, but since I didn't have an option, I selected okay. Obviously, now that I have Evolution fixed and running, I don't have a my gnome panel on the desktop forcing me to turn off my machine with the power switch and I am unable to open any program unless it was on my desktop or there was a shortcut on the desk top, etc.

My question, how do I reinstall the panel?

Thanks.

by **ongoto** » Tue Mar 20, 2012 6:11 pm

Try re-installing task-gnome.

by **earpop** » Wed Mar 21, 2012 12:50 am

Ongoto, Thanks for the suggestion. Just on problem, I'm not a complete Linux newbie, but right now I'm stumped since I literally have no access to anything unless it's on the desktop, to include the command line. I need some help on how to open a window when there is no input method. I'm thinking I might open a virtual window (hope this is the right term) using one of the function keys; i.e.; F3, etc. and then use apt-get to download the package. (Hoping that the machine will have automatically connected me to the internet since I have no clue on how to log on through the command line.) Any suggestions? Right now I'm on windows to access this site. Thanks.

by **ongoto** » Wed Mar 21, 2012 1:34 am

OK. You see a desktop but no panel. I'm guessing nautilus started. If you right click the desktop do you get a context menu with the option to open a terminal? You could also try Ctl+Alt+F2 if you have keyboard input.
If not, can you reboot and do Ctl+Alt+F2 at the login screen to get to a tty. If not you could try to add the number 3 to the options line in grub to boot to console.
Then use apt-get or whatever.

by **earpop** » Wed Mar 21, 2012 3:26 am

Problem SOLVED. --

Ongoto: I messed around and found that I could open a terminal window form the desktop as you described and, fortunately, since I had my internet connection previously setup, I was already logged onto the internet. However, I didn't reinstall the task-gnome package as you suggested. I initially started to, but noticed that a large number of dependencies were required that weren't on my machine. I concluded that if task-gnome was the missing package, then the dependencies should already be there. This lead me to keep looking. While searching the 'net I ran across a similar problem someone else had had and the recommendation was made to reinstall gnome-panel using; apt-get install --reinstall gnome-panel. I opened a terminal window on my desktop, logged in as root (su) and reinstalled gnome-panel using the apt-get command line above and then restarted my machine. Upon logging back in the panel was there!!! Life is better now.

Thanks for your help as it got me to looking and thinking.

p.s. gnome-panel is not listed by Synaptic as a separate package for installation. Consequently, the only way I could figure out how to fix the problem was to use the command line "apt-get".

Thanks again.