How to get to the interface of background programs?

[paulkater]

Hi all,

I've just installed Ubuntu Gnome 13.10. Nice work, I like it.
The thing I can't figure out is how to get the interface of software like Dropbox and Spideroak once they're loaded. They show in no list I can find, nothing in a taskbar/tray-like thingy.

Is there a specialist who can help me with this?

Thank you

Paul

[grahammechanical]

I am not on Ubuntu Gnome at the moment. So I may get this wrong. Move the pointer to the top left corner of the screen and the screen will change. There will be a search panel in the top centre of the screen. Search for the program there and search results should appear at the top of the screen. Point and click. I know that with Ubuntu we need to run these kind of applications at least once to get them appearing in the top panel as a start-up application. Not sure about Ubuntu Gnome.

Regards.

[paulkater]

Thanks for the reply. In Gnome the left top corner does indeed pop up the activities bar, as does pressing the SUPER key. Through that I can find the programs, but that's not what I meant. I'll try to be more clear: e.g. Dropbox starts automatically when the machine is booted and I'm logged in. However there is no icon for Dropbox anywhere so if I want to adjust settings for Dropbox I'm lost. Running the program one more time doesn't bring up the interface, still no icon anywhere, and also I can't find a complete task list to switch to e.g. Dropbox through that.
It's odd. ps -ef | grep -i dropbox in a terminal tells me it's running, and that's where it ends.

[buzzingrobot]

Icons for Dropbox, etc., appear in the message tray area. To display the tray, move and hold the mouse cursor against the bottom of the screen.

Some hardware seems insensitive to that. <Super>-M is the corresponding keystroke.

[paulkater]

Brilliant, works flawlessly. Thank you. :)

[buzzingrobot]

Stock Gnome distros like Fedora launch a help package on first boot. Ubuntu Gnome, last I looked, does not. Here's a link to the equivalent at the Gnome site: https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/.

[paulkater]

That is very helpful, thank you. I'm an old time Gnome2 user and screamed at Unity after which I converted my machine to show me Cinnamon.
I've run a livecd with Gnome3 a few times and really like that so decided to put that on the laptop. When 14.04 comes out I'm upping my 12.04 LTS to Gnome3 as well. It's very good to have some hands-on on the laptop with it already. :)

Much appreciate the link!