name workspaces in ubuntu/unity OR rename activitiesi n KDE

[Matt Price]

Hey Folks,

I'm being driven mildly insane by the attempt to make proper use of
desktops in Ubuntu (unity) or activities in Kubuntu (KDE). I'm urnning
an up-to-date install of 12.04 (Precise).

what I want is to have my tasks oraganized in desktops or activities
that i can identify by name. Each task should contain the windows I
need for the task at hand and no others -- so, in my "Writing" task I
want two Libreoffice windows open, one firefox window with a ocuple of
research tabs, and a few windows from acroread or evince.  In my
"Coding" window I'll have emacs and another firefox window with a
different set of tabs; and in "Procrastination and Busywork" I'll have
thunderbird running, along witha third firefox window with newspapers
& facebook & whatever.  Here's what's driving me mad:

- Unity does not seem to allow me to name my Desktops.  Not such a big
deal, but in the absence of names I can't seem to keep track of what
windows are where.  And also, totally frustrating, there's no way to
save my window setup in case I need to logout or reboot -- whcih seems
to happen more now thatn it used to.  Also unity can be very
frustrating to deal with, though I've started to get used to it after
about 8 months...

- I thought KDE activities would be the obvious solution here, but I
cnanot figure out how to modify the properties of existing KDE
activities.  Every internet guide I've found suggests that there will
be an "Activity" icon in the "Desktop Settings" window you can bring
up in various ways under KDE.  But I'm not seeing one anywhere -- the
whole icon is missing, and in fact the configuration GUI is pretty
barebones -- se ethis image,
https://launchpadlibrarian.net/103617970/desktopsetting_noact.png .
Not sure if these config options been moved somewhere else in recent
KDE versions, but if so I'm not finding any documentation about it
anywhere.  Perhaps I'm missing some crucial packages? but if so,
again, I can't tell what they might be.

If anyone can help with either one of these I'd be so happy -- this is
driving me crazy.
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