In this tutorial we will see how to move the Unity launcher (3D version) to the bottom of the screen using a Compiz plugin. By doing this, you will be able to gain more screen space, which will be useful for owners of small screens (netbooks, tablets, etc.).
This tutorial will be done under a system running Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot having the 3D version of Unity. If you don’t like these changes, you can use the last step to restore to the default Unity launcher position.
Getting Started
1. Open the terminal and install first lzma with this command:
sudo apt-get install lzma
2. Download and extract the plugin with these commands:
wget http://dl.dropbox.com/u/47006748/unityshell.tar.lzma unlzma unityshell.tar.lzma ls -l mkdir ~/unityshell tar -xvf unityshell.tar -C unityshell
3. Create now a folder for this plugin with this command:
mkdir -p ~/.compiz-1/plugins
4. Now run these commands to make the Unity launcher stick to the bottom of the screen:
cd ~/unityshell cp libunityshell.so ~/.compiz-1/plugins/ mkdir /tmp/unityshell cp *.png /tmp/unityshell/ cd /tmp/unityshell/ chmod 644 ./* sudo chown root:root ./* sudo cp ./* /usr/share/unity/4
5. Log out now the current session and log back in, or simply reset the Unity interface with this command from the terminal:
unity --replace
Screenshot:
6. To restore the Unity launcher to its default position, run simply this command:
rm ~/.compiz-1/plugins/libunityshell.so