One question that people looking for help with Xubuntu often have is some form of “my panels/taskbar/menu disappeared”. Unfortunately, this is something that happens quite frequently.
The good news is that this is fixed easily. All that’s required is to press Alt+F2 to bring forward the Run program window, and run the command xfce4-panel.
Not only is this a quick fix for the problem, it also makes for a quick blog post that might still help quite a few people 😉
Update: Xubuntu 9.04 will include Xfce 4.6 which should be able to automatically restore the panel in the event of a crash. Hooray 🙂
Update to that: According to willerlite, the panels do not automatically re-appear. Hmm :S
Xubuntu Blog 
I had the same problem with Xfce, but in my root user account. The fix for me was to copy my regular user’s ~/.config/xfce/ directory over to my /root/ directory… All of a sudden things were fixed! root had panels again.
Nice to see you still blogging away!
flacvest
If you have the problem in your root user account (which, of course, it’s recommended never to use 😉 ), you should be able to do the same, but logged in as root.
Anyway, I need more ideas like this to blog about – all my other ideas involve length blog posts that take up way too much time…
i’m curious why this happens at all? it’s much to regular to be considered a mere annoyance. i’d like to see this get fixed permanently.
I’d like it to be fixed as well, but have no idea how to. It could be that this is already fixed for 8.10. If not, I have high hopes that the new version of Xfce (4.6) that’s coming up (probably not for 8.10 though) will no longer have this issue.
This is a great tip. I haven’t had any problems with it since I upgraded to 8.04, but I had the disappearing taskbar problem on 7.10.
It isn’t fixed in 8.10 sadly…I have just experienced it.
I don’t know why it happened. But thanks to this blog post I got it fixed quickly. 🙂 Adding this to my list of ubuntu/linux blogs/RSS feeds.
Hi,
Yes it is not fixed in 8.10, how can we fix this?
This problem won’t occur in Xubuntu 9.04 anymore, which will ship Xfce 4.6 which can automatically restart it when it crashes. See my latest blog post 🙂
Thanks for the info on restoring the task bar. It worked like a charm. I have been trying to do this for about three weeks on and off. I am sorry that I didn’t take the time to look for this blog earlier. It has been worth all the time I have spent reading the material on this and other subjects.
Heh, always happy to be of help 🙂
don’t let anyone tell you it won’t happen in 9.04 – cus it does
thanks for the help.
You mean it also doesn’t automatically restart? Is that a fresh install or have you upgraded from a previous version of Xubuntu? (I can’t try it for myself, unfortunately – 9.04 won’t work…)
Was a fresh install of 9.04 and the taskbar just suddenly stopped showing up. I added it to the autostarted modules list and it always came up after that, though it was the last thing to load.
Thanks, I added a note to the post.
I seem to have another xfce (4.6.0) problem in Jaunty which no-one is referring to… This happens as follows: When I press the Quit button (the little door!) xfce asks me if I wish to quit xfce – not shut down the system. If I press OK, then xfce crashes and after telling me it has crashed, then restarts – if I press Cancel, well, it cancels. Also the Quit on the Applications menu no longer works – nothing happens. The only way I shut down is to press the physical power button, which does an orderly shut down.
How can I make the Quit button work properly again?
What happens when you run the command
xfce4-session-logoutin a terminal window?To solve this problem, go to XFCE SETTINGS MANAGER and then go to SESSION AND STARTUP section. Then go to the APPLICATION AUTOSTART and click the add button. In the command line add the command of mentioned above and make a title for it like XFCE PANEL. This will solve your problems.
Thank you helped a lot
thanks very much I have find my panel….