Gnome panels & icons

I'm using one of the Gnomes (can't tell which) with my Debian. I'm trying to place two instances of the control panel, verticaly one on each side of the screen and populate them with icons of my choice as well. How would I do this?

Lacking this option I would at least want to park my choice of app-icons around the screen perimeter but I don't know how to do that either.

I want to standardize, my 2 distros with kde look like the attached Mageia desktop

If you are using Wheezy [the current release (7)], you have Gnome 3. I have never used it, but from what I have read, customising it requires installing extra packages. I believe they are called extensions.

Originally Posted by badsector I'm using one of the Gnomes (can't tell which) with my Debian.

Debian Wheezy is Gnome 3.4, it will tell you in Gnome System Monitor

Originally Posted by badsector I'm trying to place two instances of the control panel, verticaly one on each side of the screen and populate them with icons of my choice as well. How would I do this?

I think you are mixing terminologies. There is a Control Centre and a Panel. Gnome Panel is the panel that, usually, sits at the top and has a clock in the middle of it with Applications on the left shown by hovering on the "hot corner". On the left of teh screen should be a "dock where a number of icons are.

Originally Posted by badsector Lacking this option I would at least want to park my choice of app-icons around the screen perimeter but I don't know how to do that either.

You can certainly choose what icons you want in the left "dock", if you want to have more "docks" then I suggest you use docky or something similar.

Originally Posted by badsector I want to standardize, my 2 distros with kde look like the attached Mageia desktop

Then use KDE.

The reason I use several distros and several WM's is not to be dependant on any one of them. In fact I already use KDE on two and I want to bring that down to just one with maybe LXDE coming aboard to join KDE, XFCE, and Gnome (don't know enough about LXDE yet).

Where I cannot use two vertical control panels with app icons on them, including my own scripts, then I want to put some on the desktop perimeter so as to have at least enough x-system look-n-feel commonality not to be lost when I boot a different one.

Originally Posted by Randicus Draco Albus If you are using Wheezy [the current release (7)], you have Gnome 3. I have never used it, but from what I have read, customising it requires installing extra packages. I believe they are called extensions.

I've read some threads about backleveling to Gnome, is that possible? Only asking in case I should run into insurmountable obstacles.

Originally Posted by badsector I've read some threads about backleveling to Gnome, is that possible?

What does that mean? What is backleveling?

Originally Posted by k3lt01 What does that mean? What is backleveling?

I think it's an IBM original (they used it for warp in the '90's) meaning going back one or more levels from say gnome3 to just gnome, from an imperative multi OS/WM perspective it would be better than giving gnome up altogether. Right now with my experience I don't see any alternatives to KDE/Gnome/XFCE/LXDE and I want 4 of them.

There are more GUIs than you could shake a stick at. Use one for a while, then try another, and another. You do not need to use several simultaneously to compare them.

As for installing an older version of Gnome, I would not recommend it. It may be incompatible with the system's more up-to-date libraries. If you want something similar to Gnome 2, there are a few Gnome 2 imitators out there.

Originally Posted by badsector I think it's an IBM original (they used it for warp in the '90's) meaning going back one or more levels from say gnome3 to just gnome, from an imperative multi OS/WM perspective it would be better than giving gnome up altogether. Right now with my experience I don't see any alternatives to KDE/Gnome/XFCE/LXDE and I want 4 of them.

Gnome 3 is just Gnome. If you mean go back to the old Gnome 2 then the closest thing you will get to that is MATE.

On my new 7.6 install and on users' first boot only, an annunciation appears to the effect that Gnome3 could not launch and that 'fallback' was going to be used (whatever fallback means). I had also seen choices one could make betweem Gnome3, Gnome-Classic and 'Default' (whatever default means) so I had assumed that default would be Gnome3 and classic would be Gnome2 as would be the fallback. As it is I think that I have never even seen Gnome3 to which many of the suggestions apply. I don't want to use KDE on Debian, or on more that one distro in use, but I do want some similarities in layout for the most often used features. It may be that I will have to use KDE on Debian and then try the flexibilty offered on another distro but I'm not there yet. The first Debian I ever installed years ago just for a look-see defaulted to Gnome so I kinda stuck to that.

What I'm after on a 16x9 screen is one vertical row of icons on each side be that on some custom panels or just on the desktop. I can live without this layout but it would make things much smoother.

Gnome 3 has 2 choices, Fallback (also called Classic) and Gnome Shell. Fallback is what Gnome will "default" to if the computer is unable to run Gnome Shell.

Default simply means the default choice of the user (taking into consideration the computers specs and capabilities).

If you want the vertical row of icons try the suggestion I made in post 3.