GNOME virtual desktop

[Trent Shipley]

Occasionally, when I am using out-of-the-box Ubuntu, I wind up on an
empty screen with only the wall paper showing--no system stuff, no icons
on the desktop, nothing but wallpaper.  I suspect what I am doing is
getting to a new virtual desktop, but maybe not because in KDE and OS X
a new virtual desktop keeps desktop furniture like toolbars, start
symbols, and icons on the desktop.


The big problem is that I can't figure out how to do anything useful
with the empty screen, so I have to shutdown (with the power button) and
restart.  (I guess I could look up how to change shells with a key
chord, go to a command line shell and 'sudo shutdown -r now' or startx
with a new shell number.)  But what I really want to do is to go back to
where I was (and figure out how to use virtual desktops in GNOME).