I often accidentally delete some of the icons from my top panel including battery meter, volume control, messagin icon. It gets quite frustrating not having them there. Also, you cannot get them back using Add to Panel option.
You can easily get your panel with default settings back. Just follow the following steps:
- Press Alt+F2, type ‘gnome-terminal’ without quotes and press enter.
- Now execute the following command in the terminal:
gconftool --recursive-unset /apps/panel
- Now execute the following command in terminal to remove all the panel’s settings:
rm -rf ~/.gconf/apps/panel
- Now kill the gnome-panel:
pkill gnome-panel
- The panels will be gone now. Load them back by executing:
gnome-panel &
However, if you close the terminal, gnome-panel will also be closed since terminal is the parent process of the panel. It will be fine once you reboot your computer.
Tried and tested in 9.04, 9.10, 10.04 and 10.10 Alpha.