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Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Tweaks

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Here are some tweaks I have come up with after installing Ubuntu 11.04 with the new Unity window manager. For the most part I like Unity, although it seems kind of incomplete

Screenshot I recently installed Ubuntu 11.04 and am growing to like the Unity interface pretty well.  It is similar to the Mac "dock" both in how it works and how confusing it is for someone old-school like me to configure.

Here are a couple of issues I have run into, along with my fixes:

Missing Tray Status Icons

Tray icons for things like Dropbox, Google Desktop Search, and Cisco AnyConnect don't appear in the new Unity interface.  I thought maybe they weren't supported because of some new way they are supposed to interface with the system.  But it turns out there is a way to "whitelist" any old-style app.

I decided to just "whitelist" all apps using the technique found here:

http://www.webupd8.org/2011/04/how-to-re-enable-notification-area.html

What I did was to just run the following to bring up 'dconf-editor':

sudo apt-get install dconf-tools
dconf-editor

Then, in the editor, I went to "desktop", "unity", "panel" and change the value for 'systray-whitelist' to be ['all'] from the default of ['JavaEmbeddedFrame', 'Mumble', 'Wine', 'Skype', 'hp-systray', 'scp-dbus-service']

Eclipse IDE Missing Menus

It looks look Eclipse doesn't handle its menus the way Unity wants, so by default you end up with no menubar in the Eclipse window itself, and no menubar at in the top bar of the screen either.  Creating an environment variable assignment in the shell of UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0 will make the menubar show up in the Eclipse window.  I found the best way to make sure it runs is to add it to the shell script that starts up Eclipse.  Just add the following to the top of the shell script:

export UBUNTU_MENUPROXY=0

Startup Bar Tweaking

One of the things that is kind of annoying about Unity is that the icon bar on the side for starting apps is severely lacking in ways to configure it.  It works very well out of the box, but I would like to be able to add custom launchers and I have not found a way to do that.

To keep items in the bar even after they run, right click on them and select "Keep in Launcher".  To move items around, drag the icon away from the bar and then back to it where you want it.

Weird Overlay Scrollbars

To remove the dynamic overlay scrollbars that are mostly just confusing to me:

sudo apt-get remove overlay-scrollbar

Source: http://ubuntu4beginners.blogspot.com/2011/04/disable-overlay-scrollbars-in-ubuntu.html

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