It is shown how you can easily turn the bottom panel of Gnome into a kind of simplest dock.
PS: While doing different things, updates came.
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Now the desktop on my test installation Lucid (the New Wave theme, plus some shamanism with settings) looks like this:
And the boot image, which is shown for 2-3 seconds, looks like it was predicted in the announcement of the new brand
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Brand#Boot Splash