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