Unity 2D users (or rather, ‘testers’ since it’s still very much in development) in Maverick who are bored of the solid bar launcher can, with a bit of jiggery-pokery, make a fully transparent version.
Fully transparent
First you need to find a wallpaper that matches your screen resolution. Save two copies of it. From your chosen image you need to crop a rectangle from the far-left with the following dimensions:
- width: 58px
- height: resolution’s height minus 24px (the height of the top panel)
E.g. for my 1440×900 monitor I take 900 and subtract -24, giving me 876. Save your cropped image and move it, as root (ALT+F2 > gksu nautilus) to
- /usr/share/unity/themes/launcher_background_middle.png
Don’t forget to log out and back in to see the change take effect.
The catch(es)
Firstly this involves overwriting the default launcher background, so be sure to make a backup first. Secondly, depending on your design, your launcher may stick out like a sore thumb since the main desktop panel is not ‘configurable’. Finally subsequent updates to Unity 2D will overwrite this again, so keep your created image handy also.
— Update —
Reader Sergey sent in a few tips that may be of use to those attempting this: –
To avoid automatic background replacement on upgrades, run
sudo dpkg-divert /usr/share/unity/themes/launcher_background_middle.png
To change the background back to the default one, run:
sudo dpkg-divert --remove /usr/share/unity/themes/launcher_background_middle.png && sudo apt-get install --reinstall unity-asset-pool
Thanks to Viktor & Sergey