How to remove bottom panel in Gnome Shell

Question

How do you remove that obnoxious pseudo-invisible bottom panel in Gnome Shell in 11.10? Network Manager is especially annoying, as it will place a large "Network Disconnected!" tab that won't go away until I click on it, as if I wasn't already aware I no longer had an Internet connection.

In 10.04, it used to make a small growl modal in the upper right hand corner that gradually faded away. I really miss that. How do I get that back and permanently remove the bottom panel? I'm aware of various PPAs offering shell extensions, but I haven't been able to find one offering this explicit functionality.

Answer 1

An enterprising developer has claimed to come up with just this solution - for me it does work with a small tweak described below.

To get this to work with 11.10:

Extract the source.

Rename the folder from gnome-shell-extension-remove-bottom-bar to remove_bottom_bar@k2z.com

Then in this folder edit the file metadata.json

Replace the contents of this file with the following, save and close:

{
    "shell-version": [ "3.2" ],
    "uuid": "remove_bottom_bar@k2z.com",
    "name": "Remove bottom bar",
    "description": "Removes the Message tray (bottom bar). I recommend to use with gnome-shell-gnome2-notifications extention by rcmorano.",
    "url": "http://www.k2z.com", 
    "version": 3
}

Then move the folder to the location ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions

Logout and login and activate the extension using gnome-tweak-tool

Answer 2

Notifications can be moved to the top right corner using this extension.

BTW, if you're looking for lots of extensions, you better check the Gnome Shell Extensions website instead of using PPAs.