I looked high and low, maybe my search terms were not accurate enough, but I didn't find anything that solved this issue, and I can imagine that it is something so simple to have been overlooked.

I have 2 laptops, an Acer Aspire 3610 and a Dell Inspiron 1520. Both have Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook 32-bit installed, along with Windows 7 in dual-boot environments. I've just about worked out the kinks in Movie Player and VLC, but the main issue here is about the SYSTEM window.

Ya know, the one that brings up Preferences and Administration? Well, from Day One on the Inspiron, the window has been too long to scroll to the bottom, and I'd lose the last 2 or 3 apps, like USERS, UPDATE MANAGER and such that were at the end of the alphabet. This is NOT true on the Acer, it has no trouble getting to the bottom.

Note, did a bit more research, and the Acer has 10 full lines of 4 icons each, whereas the Inspiron has only 6 lines of 5 icons displayed, the 7th line can not be scrolled to. The icons are definitely smaller on the Inspiron, but it still can't get to the bottom.

I've tried the Blue Pill, I've seen the 5-step program for tweaking the desktop, but I can't find anything that talks to this. Is there anything I can compare between the 2 to see what might be wrong?

I'm also looking to see why movies playback fine, but TV-Series balk, in Movie Player and VLC, but that is for another thread...I may still find that one in my search. At least they both play movies okay now, and that was a BIG hurdle. Thanks to all that came before, and were advised as to how to proceed.

Try holding down the Alt key also click and hold down left mouse button on the offending window. You should be able to drag the window in any direction you wish, you should now be able to get to the bottom.

Most window managers allow you to move windows by pressing alt+<hold left click>.

You might want to try to set an higher resolution on that machine, so the window fits entirely, if your hardware supports it at all.

Alt-click-drag won't work in this case because the OP is referring to the Gnome System menu which drops down from the top thingy.

I have ubuntu 9.10 on my tiny EEE701. If I go to System-Admin I see a list of useful programs. This list is too long to fit my screen, but it has a little ^ or V icon at the top/bottom of the partial list, and I can mouse over those to see the whole list, a little at a time. The scroll-wheel on my mouse also moves me up and down the list

If you don't like this, or it doesn't work for you, can R-Click "System", choose "Edit menus" and then reconfigure the Admin menu so it is broken up into shorter lists that will fit on your screen.

Thanks to you all for coming to help. These are 2 laptops, no mouse wheel to tend with, and the ALT key doesn't do squat with this menu. The resolution is at the max choices, and the thing that gets me, Dell is affected while the Acer isn't. Both have 15" LCDs, and (FCOL) the icons are bigger and there are more of them on the ACER (which has no problem). The Dell has (as best as I can determine) 32 icons in the System menu, 17 in Prefs and 15 (possibly more, but I can't see past the tops of the third row) in Admin. The Acer has 20 in each.

I just checked, I didn't find any little arrows anywhere. This menu fills the screen, so there is no way to move or change the size by conventional methods that I know of. Plus, I've pared down the entries in both sets, and placed additional separators in the menu, with no effect.

If I could split the SYSTEM element, or move some of the Prefs into the SYSTEM TOOLS element...

The eMachines M2352 that I had was afflicted the same way, and I never did figure out what to do.

No little arrows for scrolling the too-long menu list, that's odd.

The only other thing I can think of is for you to check the Display resolution on the Dell: System- Preferences - Display. What is it set to? Can you set it to something else? Does this make any difference?

Display resolution is 1280X800 (16:10) or the max available. I went there first when I found the problem, thinking that making the icons smaller with higher resolution might do something...no such luck. Curious thing, the Acer has it's resolution set lower, 1024X768 (4:3). The Acer icons AR larger, and there are 4 per row in it's menu. The Dell (Inspiron) has 5 icons per row.

Upon further investigation, the Dell is missing an entire row altogether. 17 Preferences are visible, and of the 16 Administration icons, only 10 are visible.

Solved, after a fashion. I tried setting the resolution lower, to mimic the Acer at 1024X768, and there was something else. In 1260X800, the Dell's refresh cycle was 61. Once in 1024X768 it was 85, and I set it back to 60.

Well, the icons are now all visible, but the typeface is larger than I'd like it to be. So, we've found a solution of sorts, but not quite what I'm looking for. This interface is clunky compared to the higher resolution.

Yeh, I took it back to higher resolution. I guess that in order to see and use those utilities from the GUI, I'll need to 'dummy down' the resolution. Or pare down the Preferences more.

Question, just what would you propose? This menu editor doesn't have a lot of flexibility, or I'd add another top level item, like UserPrefs and move Preferences into it. Then, Administration would have no trouble. The icon that you are referring to is the Main Menu in Preferences, no? It is there that you can add or delete items from all of the menues. And they are the items from the main desktop sidebar.

New information:

I got a report during boot that the extended partition had an error, so I decided to boot from Live-CD and run an FSCK on the Ubuntu partition, just to see.

Guess what? When I opened the SYSTEM tab, I could see ALL of the icons, all 20 of them in both Preferences and Administration. I then checked the DISPLAY, and it was set to the offending 1290X800 with a refresh cycle of 61. Now, I'm back, after having a successful FSCK show the partition to be clean, booted from it, in fact. The SYSTEM tab is again NOT showing me the last 7 entries in the Administration window. What might be happening when I go from the Live-CD into the actual configured Ubuntu to cause this?

I just don't know where to look, maybe I need to use an old driver for the video, or limit the system to using the driver from the Live-CD?

I was going to suggest that you try a "normal" ubuntu disk (not the "Netbook" one), because that is what is running perfectly on my EEE at 800x480, but it seems you have already discovered this works for you too.

Do you need the "Netbook" variety? I have no idea how it differs from the regular variety, but it would seem that something is broken.

Running Netbook on a laptop just seemed to make sense. I've had it spit up when I've run the wrong Live-CD in a given environment. I have all 4 versions of Ubuntu stored for burning, but have never tried running the Desktop version on my laptops.

Of course, this Inspiron, at 1.5GHz with 2GB RAM and a 140GB HDD rivals many of the desktops that I work on occasionally. And, I just got all of the bells and whistles to working in THIS Netbook Remix, it would almost be like starting over to install the generic desktop version. Still, I have a Live-CD of the generic lying around, I could boot into it for operant behavior.

I have most recently downloaded Damn_Small_Linux and am going the burn a Live-CD to see how it plays compared to Ubuntu in that mode.

EDIT: Gave it a go with DSL, it's nowhere near as smooth as Ubuntu, but it is a business card form of Linux. However, I went ahead and tried to install the 9.10-desktop-i386, the machine didn't complain, and the GUI is different enough to make the issue here moot. The pull-downs replace the windows of the netbook GUI, and there isn't ANY problem getting at them all now. Display resolution is set at it's max, too, and seems very happy there.

So, the lesson here, if you're on a laptop, go ahead and try the desktop to see if it may run, especially if your hardware rivals most desktops.