I'm not sure what sort of Linux gods I have angered but it seems they have it in for me.
I was editing a secondary panel and moving the applets around when suddenly the system crashed.
Fair enough, I'll just restart the thing and just try again. However, I wasn't lucky enough to get back into the system...
The desktop froze at a black screen, showing only the faulty secondary panel. No icons, no desktop, no menus, no responses to keyboard, nothing.
So, lucky I had a second computer to look up the fix. Seriously, Linux is not ready for mainstream use if you can't even fiddle with the user interface.
- Load up your system and get into restore mode via GRUB
- Select "Drop to root shell prompt"
- Type "rm -rf /home/your_username/.gconf/apps/panel"
- Exit and restart your system
- Unfortunately you'll have to set up your panels again
- Fortunately, you don't have to format and reinstall Linux (starting to sound like Windows)
Alternate solution
I tried this first and it did not work. It involved deleting "/home/your_username/.recently-used.xbel" instead.
