Thank you to Dave Jaye for this recommendation. You can hear more from Dave Jaye at his Myspace page.
Cairo-Dock is an animated launch bar similar to SimDock or AWN. You can use it to launch applications and utilize small applets that live on the bar. It lacks some of the visual effects provided by AWN, but it my experience it runs a little faster.
This application is an continuation of the abandoned GNOME-Dock project. According to the Ubuntu Wiki:
[...] it is compatible with Beryl, Compiz, Metacity+xcompmgr and probably KDE since Kwin now manage composite display.
There's definitely a lot of eye candy infused into this bar. It has animated icons, a 3D plane with reflection. And then there's my favorite: carousel view --- the icons are arranged in a circle, saving some screen estate and wowing your friends.
Sexy, I know. It turns out that cairo-dock runs quite a bit faster than earlier projects. This video shows that off quite well. The dock is highly configurable, allowing you to tweak almost every aspect of the appearence. And, you can even attach it to the top of your screen instead of the default bottom placement.
Dave Jaye likes the small application size and the flexibility provided by cairo-dock:
I really like the auto-hide feature of Cairo-Dock, it doesn't intrude on my desktop until I need it. It's also quite flexible. You can configure it in a number of different ways from a simple 2D plane view, a 3D tilted plane or a carousel configuration.
Installation is a bit more complicated than for previous posts. First, fire up your browser and install the dependencies if you haven't already:
sudo apt-get install libcairo2 librsvg2-2Now, go to the cairo-dock project site and download the latest .deb file. If you want, you can do that with the following command:
wget http://prdownload.berlios.de/cairo-dock/cairo-dock_v1.4.6.3_i686-32bits.debFinally, you can install the deb file by clicking on it, or by using the following command (if you downloaded a different version of the .deb, please adjust the command accordingly).
sudo dpkg -i cairo-dock_v1.4.6.3_i686-32bits.debTo try it out, type the following into the Terminal or into the Alt+F2 dialog:
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14 comments:
Why make the installation that complicated? I just downloaded the .deb file and clicked on it in nautilus. From there I followed the GUI. No need to involve the command line at all.
Why go through all the extra clicks when you can just do it all from the command line ? ;)
I <3 cli
@soren: I agree with you --- sometimes it is easier to install .deb packages with gdebi instead of dpkg on the command line. But, gdebi has only recently been included in Ubuntu, and not everyone has it installed. So, in an attempt to be universal (and laziness --- I didn't want to provide info to install gdebi!), I chose to give command line directions.
But, you CAN install cairo-dock graphically by clicking on the package. In fact, I included that in my article: "Finally, you can install the deb file by clicking on it". Thanks for the comment, though.
I don't know what it is about cairo-dock, but I really dislike it for some reason. I'm using AWN at the moment, and while it's by no means perfect (seems sluggish with resizing for every new window, and I can't seem to find a speed setting for animations) I vastly prefer it to cairo-dock. I can appreciate that cairo-dock is more lightweight, but it just seems a bit... toy like, maybe?
The icons come across as cartoonish, even though they're the same icons.
I used to use the dock provided with gDesklets back before compositing was common. That always struck me as nice.
By the way, does cairo-dock use the launchers as places to store the primary window in the same way as AWN does? Hope that makes sense.
You can give it the appearance you want (look at the MacOSX theme, a perfect copy), and even make it static like awn.
yes it is faster, and it can even use hardware acceleration through OpenGL, which make it a lot faster.
btw the last version is 1.5.0 already.
When I run "sudo dpkg -i cairo-dock_v1.4.6.3_i686-32bits.deb" I get this back:
dpkg-deb: `cairo-dock_v1.4.6.3_i686-32bits.deb' is not a debian format archive
dpkg: error processing cairo-dock_v1.4.6.3_i686-32bits.deb (--install):
subprocess dpkg-deb --control returned error exit status 2
Errors were encountered while processing:
cairo-dock_v1.4.6.3_i686-32bits.deb
Any ideas?
Didn't know you could apt-get in your browser ;)
@Doug
Yeah, you downloaded the URL that has links to the package, not the package itself. Just run these commands:
sudo aptitude install libglitz1 libglitz-glx1
mkdir ~/cairodock
cd ~/cairodock
wget http://download.berlios.de/cairo-dock/cairo-dock_v1.5.0.1_i686-32bits.deb
wget http://download.berlios.de/cairo-dock/cairo-dock-plug-ins_v1.5.0.1_i686-32bits.deb
sudo dpkg -i *
cd
rm -rf cairodock
Thanks, that worked!
Does anyone know how to create a launcher in Cairo-Dock that executes a script (*.sh) ? I can't seem to figure out a way to do this. I've even tried to create a launcher that opens the terminal and passes the script to the open terminal. And I love Cairo Dock, works much better for me than AWN did. Thanx!
The link to the Ubuntu Wiki is getting a bit outdated.
I recommend instead to go to the official Wiki here:
http://cairo-dock.necropotame.fr/ww_page.php?p=Accueil&lang=en
Inside you will find several way to install the dock. There is a repository now.
I installed the deb file from the cairo dock site. It installed ok except when I run the cario-dock command it gives the following report:
robin@robin-desktop:~$ cairo-dock
warning : (cairo-dock-modules.c:cairo_dock_initialize_module_manager:56)
Attention : Error opening directory '/usr/share/cairo-dock/plug-in': No such file or directory
no module will be available
The plugin directory does ont exist by cairo-dock directory does exist.
The bar does install and can be opened but attempting to move it produces the following:
gtk_widget_size_allocate(): attempt to allocate widget with width -2 and height 96
gtk_widget_size_allocate(): attempt to allocate widget with width -2 and height 96
gtk_widget_size_allocate(): attempt to allocate widget with width -2 and height 96
gtk_widget_size_allocate(): attempt to allocate widget with width -2 and height 96
gtk_widget_size_allocate(): attempt to allocate widget with width -2 and height 96
when i use it the terminal has to be open, why is this is there a way to keep it permanent? or do i always have to keep the terminal oprn?
robbyn, did you install the plugins .deb too?
notoriussloth, don't run Cairo Dock from the terminal. Either run it with alt+F2 or set it to run on startup.
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