The Golden Ratio

Once Ubuntu was up and running on my laptop I wanted to add a docking functionality to it. The first docking application that I found was Gnome Dock. Some looking around showed that there hadn’t been any progress made on Gnome Dock for quite some time, the only comments on their pages for the last couple of months was various versions of “lol, I’m bored”. I figured there had to be at least a couple of other docking applications around that was still being maintained.

Some searching turned up Avant Window Navigator, which seemed to fill my needs perfectly. A simple docking application that supported both application launchers and task lists. It also has an option of adding additional applets, which might be nice to have sometime in the future.

See the addendum for an updated version of the repository links

Before the real installation could start the repository for AWN had to be added to my installation. This was done by adding

## Avant Window Navigator
deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/syzygy42/ gutsy avant-window-navigator
deb-src http://download.tuxfamily.org/syzygy42/ gutsy avant-window-navigator

To the end of the /etc/apt/source.list file. Then I had to run

wget http://download.tuxfamily.org/syzygy42/8434D43A.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -

In a terminal window to authorize code from this repository. After this a couple of simple aptitude commands gets the application installed.

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude upgrade
sudo aptitude install avant-window-navigator-bzr

Now AWN has been installed, and it can be started by calling avant-window-navigator from the command-line. The default installation is pretty simplistic, but it is working.

An image of my AWN, as simple it gets

As I enjoy customizing applications I had to change the default theme. When I at last found one that I liked, Blue Glass, it was a simple matter of downloading it and extracting the theme files into the ~/.config/awn/themes/ folder. Some more minutes of tweaking font sizes and icon refection and I had it configured just as I wanted it.

After having used it for a couple of days now the only gripe I have with it is that it cannot group open applications. So I usually end up having way too many Terminal applications on the task bar. Would be much easier to keep everything organized if it had grouped all of them into one icon folder and used a pop-up menu to choose between them. Hopefully that will be added soon, saw that it was already mentioned on their coming feature list. If not it should be possible to create a plug-in to fix it. Maybe that is something to spend the time on as the spring rain sets in…

Edit on February 21st
As Mark Lee commented bellow there is now a new repository available for Avant Window Navigator. To use the updated version of AWN available there I changed the two lines of code added to the /etc/apt/source.list file to:

## Avant Window Navigator
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/reacocard-awn/ubuntu gutsy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/reacocard-awn/ubuntu gutsy main

I couldn’t find any public key available to authorize the repository, so when upgrading I have to manually accept the changes from this repository. To upgrade to the newest version from the new repository all that was needed now was to enter

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude upgrade

If you’re installing AWN for the first time, you have to change the last line to

sudo aptitude install avant-window-navigator-bzr

On the question Untrusted packages could compromise… avant-window-navigator-bzr… I answered Yes, since I knew that the code from the newly added repository wasn’t authorized in my system yet, but I want to use it anyway. No use in adding it to the repository otherwise. Now I’m the lucky owner of a sparkling new AWN install, that I’m off to play with.

Technorati Tags: Avant Window Navigator, Ubuntu