Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
CONFIGURING UNITY IN UBUNTU 11.10
You may be a little disappoin-ted with this one, since it is really about how little you can configure; indeed, how little Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, wants you to configure Unity.
You'll find various opinions on this subject, the most telling at Ask Ubuntu, a generally excellent knowledge-base, where a spokesperson for the Unity development team is uncharacteristically blunt:
“I understand that people want the freedom to tweak their desktops, but as soon as you use Compiz Config Settings Manager (CCSM), you have basically opted out of Unity's future. The bugs you report will not matter since you're not running the defaults, and any input you may have will be skewed by the customized user experience you've devised.”
So there! Yah-boo sucks! If you want to change it, you're not part of the future. There is an attempt to be a little more conciliatory however:
“Making a new desktop is challenging, and we can't do it without you. That means filing bugs, proposing new use cases with mock ups, and of course: running the defaults throughout your day.” – ppetraki, 11/22/2011
None of which actually answers the question.
Well, you could try elsewhere on Ask Ubuntu, where there are indexes for both 11.10 and 11.04 versions.
For the hardware-challenged user needing to configure Unity 2D, you have a separate index. Most of the answers listed there involve the use of Compiz Config Settings Manager, dconf-editor or some elements of Ubuntu Tweak.
Be aware that many of these can break your system and render it unusable. What they still don't do is open up many features of Unity's behavior since, well, Canonical just doesn't trust you to mess with them.
It's Open Source, Jim, but not as we know it!
Scopes and Lenses
Since the 11.04 release, Unity has moved from the idea of “Places” to a richer set of “Scopes and Lenses.” Scopes are data sources, able to tap into any on-line or off-line data, encom-passing a set of filters and some standard interfaces that can generate categorized results for a search. Lenses are various ways to present the data that come from Scopes.
Ubuntu intends for Scopes to have a range of filtering options, such as ratings, “show me all the 5 star apps in the Software Center please,” and categories “…that are games or media related”.
There's more about lenses over the page.