This tutorial is for those users who , like myself, incessantly cherish the habit of having a hidden taskbar and in term, a cleaner desktop. ‘ Why?’, a few curious onlookers might ask. Lets just say, the rule of thumb is, the more the viewing area the more visually soothing our experience with the tech-infused world we live in, becomes.
As you can guess from my previous post, that my infatuation for Ubuntu has somewhat rekindled in the last couple of weeks. However, this time I’m a man on a mission; that of finding out what drove me off Ubuntu last time and how I can choose a safe detour this time. One of these “draw-backs” of Ubunu was its inability to minimize the taskbar (Gnomebar) completely. Even if you choose “Auto Hide” from the panel properties, the hidden panel would still show up as a tiny strip like eyesore.The solution? Why use the good ole’ gconf-editor offcourse. Here’s how to do that:
1) While in Ubuntu press Alt+F2. This would bring forth the “Run Application” dialogue.
2) Write ‘ gconf-editor ‘ (without the quotation marks) and press run.
3) What opens in the new window looks kinda like the registry editor from (gasp) Windows right? This is the Gnome equivalent of the registry-editor. Anyhow, once there navigate to apps/panel/toplevels/[your panel name]. Here the panel name corresponds to either the lower or upper Gnome-panels. You can however, edit both.
4) On the right pane, double click on the line that says auto_hide_size and write the new value as 1 (replacing the default, 6px). Presto! Now you have the whole screen-area of your monitor to exploit.
Productivity Tip:
For the medium to advanced users, I also recommend playing around with other panel options like autohide delay. That might improve your Ubuntu experience by a greater margin.
via Bunch of me