I suddenly find that my gnome applications panel would appear at the “top” of the screen instead of the “bottom”
So I tried to drag/move it to bottom but I couldn’t.
So I right-click and check the Panel properties and I find the “Orientation” field set to the value “Top” and it was disabled. There was also a message "“Some of these properties are locked down”
Since it was disabled I was unable to change to value back to bottom.
I googled around to find the following links:
Moving the locked top panel in Ubuntu/GNOME
[gnome] Panel moves to top and won’t go back to bottom - Page 2 - Ubuntu Forums](http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1054353&page=2)
Weird gnome-panel on restart - Ubuntu Forums
So here’s what I did to fix it.
Open gconf-editor
$ gconf-editor &
Navigate to
apps -> panel -> toplevels -> <paneltofix> -> orientation
and change the value from “Top” to “Bottom”
In my case the <paneltofix> is shown as “bottom_panel_screen0”