Tweaking Ubuntu with bTweaker, Unsettings, and Unity Tweak Tool

Ubuntu does a great job of hiding the technical complexity of Linux behind a sleek and user-friendly interface, but this user-friendliness comes at a price: The lack of direct access to advanced settings makes the distro less customizable. Fortunately, several tools are available to help you tweak Ubuntu to your heart's content. In this article, I'll take a look at three utilities for customizing Ubuntu and the Unity desktop environment: bTweaker, Unsettings, and Unity Tweak Tool.

bTweaker at Your Command

bTweaker [1] doesn't reveal any hidden Ubuntu settings or give you access to the system's inner workings. Instead, this simple Python-based tool puts several useful commands and tools right at your fingertips, making it easier to perform common maintenance tasks and configure some basic settings. Because bTweaker is just a Python script, it requires no installation. The script is available in three versions, and you need to download the version appropriate to the Ubuntu release installed on your machine.

If you are running Ubuntu 12.10, you can get the latest 1.x.x version of bTweaker or pick the unstable version of the script for use with Ubuntu 13.04. To be able to run the script, you have to make it executable. To do this, right-click on the downloaded .py file and choose Properties . Switch to the Permissions section, enable the Allow executing file as program option, and press Close .

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