Lost main menu bar after deleting mate dock

Support & Help Requests Raspberry Pi
#1

This may have been asked before, but if so it’s hard to find.
Ubuntu-Mate 16.04.2 on RPi 3B
I added a mate-dock to the top menu bar/panel/dock (the main one with Applications Places System time etc), and wanted to remove it. I made the mistake of agreeing to delete the panel. This killed the top bar entirely and made running any application extremely difficult. It did not reappear on rebooting so I have had to completely reinstall the OS on the microSD card and start over (along with the tedious repartitioning kludge to allow software updating)

Question 1: if I manage to do this again, is there a simple way to reactivate to top bar?
Question 2: is there a mechanism to install a launch bar at left like the default full Ubuntu. I can create a new panel there (with tiny icons) but it’s not the same.

Thanks

#2

System > Preferences > Look and Feel > MATE Tweak.

From here you can change some features of the Panel. Once you have a setup you like, you can click Save Panel Layout allowing to reload the panel whenever you want.

If you accidentally delete your panel again, you should be able reopen it by opening a terminal with CTRL+ALT+T and running mate-panel or alternatively mate-tweak to load the panel you saved earlier.

To answer your next question, you can increase the size of a panel you create by right clicking the panel and selecting properties; icons you put on there should scale with the panels size. I created a test panel on the right to demo this. You could alternatively install a dock, 'plank' comes with the 'Cupertino' layout (via MATE Tweak) - also visible below.

demo.png1366×768 846 KB

#3

Thanks. Clearly I should have waited for this reply before reinstalling!

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