How to hide bottom panel in GNOME?

Solution 1:

You can enable buttons to hide the panel whenever you want - if you don't want to delete the panel altogether:

→

To do this, right click the panel, select Properties and check Show hide buttons

Solution 2:

Are you maybe using an older Ubuntu version? I wrote a Gnome patch a long time ago, which changed the standard auto hide size to 0/1 pixel. At least the last two Gnome versions should ship with that patch.

Of course you can also change it manually:

• Open the application gconf-editor. If you don't have it, install it.
• Go to /apps/panel/toplevels/bottom_panel_screen0
• Change the value auto_hide_size to 0 or 1.

Solution 3:

Here's the best way to hide the gnome panel:

1. Install compiz and ccsm
2. Open ccsm and enable the "widget layer" feature
3. In the widget layer options, go to "behaviour" tab
4. Add the line name=gnome-panel in the field widget windows
5. Close ccsm

Once this is done you will see the gnome panels only when you display the widget layer. the default key for this is F9