Is it possible to hide the title bar on the top bar on unity (Ubuntu 11.10)?
When I use Chrome the title of the current tab appears on the top bar, which is unnecessary because the same title appears on Chrome's tab.
Is it possible to hide it, or to prevent maximized windows from merging with the top bar?
The so called Unity "panel" (the top bar) is supposed to merge with the bar of a maximized window, but the contents of the window's client area are left to the application, i.e. Chrome in this case.
As for your other question, the answer is no. There's no setting to hide or autohide the Unity panel in Ubuntu 11.10 without a GUI app running. I was looking for something like that when I stumbled upon these:
You can still toggle full screen mode by hitting F11 (that should work with other applications as well), but doing so will also remove the tab captions in Chrome.