October 10, 2008
Application Dock for Linux – better than Apple?
okay, well, I’m not sure if this is better than Apple’s application dock. I’ve never really played around with it, just watched others use it. And the main thing I notice is that all the docks look the same – it seems there is little customization (that I can tell – feel free to correct me if I’m wrong!).
so I’ve been scouring the internet for all available docks I could try and setup in Ubuntu (I’ll post all my findings later), and I came across something called the Cairo Dock. Seemed kinda cool, so I installed it…and whoa! It was really awesome! A bunch of options and the animations are really smooth, even with a bunch of programs opened on my old Gateway laptop (just 512 of RAM, bleh). AWN, though cool, always seemed to bog the system down and be a little stiff – this just feels really loose and free.
So how’d I get it? I used these instructions with no problems:
Add this to your sources list:
deb http://repository.cairo-dock.org/ubuntu hardy cairo-dock
(replace “hardy” with “gutsy” if you’re using 7.10)
Then add the repo key:
wget -q http://repository.cairo-dock.org/ubuntu/cairo-dock.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -
And then finally to install the program:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install cairo-dock cairo-dock-plug-ins
You can open it up under “System Tools” in the menu, or just hit Alt-F2 and type “cairo-dock”
This blog seemed to explain a bunch of other stuff about Cairo Dock that I want to try out, but haven’t had time to yet.
Tags: cairodock, AWN, apple dock, application dock, linux, ubuntu, hardy, gutsy
