Changing panel background

[joey-elijah]

This is something i've never quite figured out...

in some themes when i change the panel background it changes fully, in others it changes all but any applets...

See: -

http://img183.imageshack.us/img183/2238/screenshot008c.png

how can i 'change' a theme so that it uses the specified background for ALL of the panel?

[duvalx7]

This is an ongoing problem with theming in Gnome that they refuse to fix, this is not the only problem either, sometimes the text does not match the panel and needs to be changed only there is no easy way to change this, (editing .gtkrc-2.0 and restarting the panel can change text color). Instead of fixing problems they make things worse by disabling icons by default in menus, so one more extra step needed to make Gnome based desktops look good, also for years people has been calling for a good looking background panel in the default Ubuntu installation, that has not been forthcoming either,it is more important to remove the Gimp, so if they can not provide a simple bitmap to make the panel look good, I do not see them fixing anything as far as theming is concerned look how long it took them to provide good desktop backgrounds, so much for the vision of making Ubuntu more beautiful than the Mac.

Maybe you will have to wait until late 2010 when Gnome Shell is released in Gnome 3.0 before anything like that is addressed, I would not be too hopeful though, as Ubuntu and Gnome seem to have some penchant for ugliness.