Panel

From Mandriva Community Wiki

Restoring the panel

If you don't know whether your desktop manager is KDE or Gnome, it's very probably KDE, Mandriva's default.

KDE

If you deleted your panel or if it has become corrupted, you can easily install a new one on KDE. Go to Application launcher menu → Tools → Konsole terminal and launch one by one, as ordinary user, the following 3 commands, depending on your version of Mandriva (in fact, of your version of KDE inside Mandriva):

Mandriva 2010 and later

For Mandriva 2010 (KDE 4.3 and later), the 3 commands are:

[user@mycomputer ~]$ kquitapp plasma-desktop

[user@mycomputer ~]$ rm ~/.kde4/share/config/plasm* -fv

[user@mycomputer ~]$ plasma-desktop &

The first one stops the program "plasma-destop", the second one deletes files, the third one relaunches plasma-desktop.

Mandriva 2009 and 2009 Spring

For Mandriva 2009 (up to KDE 4.2 included) the 3 commands are:

[user@mycomputer ~]$ kquitapp plasma

[user@mycomputer ~]$ rm ~/.kde4/share/config/plasm* -fv

[user@mycomputer ~]$ plasma &

The first one stops the program "plasma", the second one deletes files, the third one relaunches plasma.

Gnome

If you or your system administrator have chosen Gnome as desktop manager, then what Ahmad Samir wrote may interest you: "To reset Gnome desktop to defaults I think you need to rename (or delete) .gconf , .gnome2 and .local/share/gvfs-metadata in your /home and log out > log in."
I've not tested. It's probable other configurations may be deleted by such a process.