The GNOME Panel | ||
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Using the GNOME Panel is very simple and will come easily to anyone who has used a graphical desktop environment. This section will give you a basic introduction to help you get started, and the following sections will discuss the various Panel objects and features in more detail.
A Panel can hold several types of objects. The example Panel in Figure 1 shows each type of Panel object.
This example Panel contains the following objects:
Menus. Menus are lists of items, each of which either starts an application, executes a command, or is a submenu. In the example Panel in Figure 1 , the left-most icon after the arrow is a stylized footprint icon (the GNOME logo). This is the Main Menu, one of the most important objects in the Panel. This menu provides access to almost all the applications, commands, and configuration options available in GNOME. The Main Menu is described in detail in the section called The Main Menu. The second icon shown is a folder, the default icon used for user menus. GNOME allows users to create their own menus with personalized contents to use in addition to the Main Menu. To open a menu, just click on the icon with the left mouse button. For more information on menus, see the section called Menus.
Launchers. Launchers are buttons which either start an application or execute a command when you press them (click with the left mouse button). The third icon in the example Panel is a launcher which starts the Gnumeric spreadsheet. For more information on launchers, see the section called Launchers.
Applets. Applets are applications which run inside a small part of the Panel. The fourth through eighth icons in the example Panel are applets. The first applet shown is the GNOM