How do I get a Mac-like Gnome panel/menu bar (which changes accordingly to the active window).

Solution 1:

Can you provide more information? Unity already comes with a global menu. But if you use GNOME2 or GNOME3 you can use the globalmenu package. You can find more information here:

http://code.google.com/p/gnome2-globalmenu/

And install instructions over here:

http://code.google.com/p/gnome2-globalmenu/wiki/Installation

This adds the same global menu as in Unity.