Saturday, May 28, 2011

Elementary Chrome Theme

For those of us that love and use Elementary, a theme for Gnome and also for Nautilus by way of the highly-recommendable Nautilus-Elementary, it can be a bit irksome to have just one part of your system not matching. If you use Chrome, you may enjoy this Elementary-style theme for the speedy browser.
Installation is pretty straightforward, so I'll spare ya the details unless otherwise requested.

Change Unity launcher size

As mentioned in the previous post, you can tweak some of the unity settings through compizconfig-settings-manager. Install and run this application.
Next, click on Ubuntu Unity Plugin, and you can use a slider to adjust the size of your launcher.
This is particularly useful for those of us using Unity on a netbook.
You may want to take some time to play with some other settings while in the application as some of them are useful.

Remove Unity icon background color

Unity has a default behavior which colors icon backgrounds to match with the main color of the icon. At first, I assumed that the color must've been coordinated with some unseen function of the application. Then I thought maybe it was random. When I noticed that it was just matching, I decided to seek out a way around it. For those of us that find the Unity icon color behavior to be strange and a bit distracting, you can disable this behavior quite easily.
1) Install compizconfig-settings-manager (through software center or:
sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager
2)Open the application and click on the Ubuntu Unity Plugin button
3)Turn off "backlighting"

This achieves, in my opinion, a much cleaner look.