Thursday 1 February 2007

Sweet mother of all that is holy!

756 Diggs and counting for Awn!
I now feel I should have tried harder with the website ;)

Anyway, I feel this is a good a time as any to clear some things up:

1) I don't work for Google (I wish I did :), but do use their excellent project-hosting services.

2) This differs from previous docks in that it is firstly a task switcher, just like the task list in GNOME, and therefore it will keep track of all open windows on the desktop.

3) Although this look like the MAC OS X dock, it does not try to imitate it. Awn is fully configurable, it has planned features not available elsewhere, such as the ability for applications to control their icons through dbus, and allow progress indicators on the icon.

4) Launching applications from Awn and tracking the application windows (like 'The Dock') is planned, and is being implemented as we speak.

5) The dependency on a patched libwnck is not required in svn.

6) I you are getting a segfault, this is a problem with schema installation, and can be overcome by entering the 'data' directory (after make install), and executing:
$  gconftool-2 --install-schema-file=avant-window-navigator.schemas
Also, if you are using svn, be sure to try the new task-manger launching Awn like this:
$ avant-window-navigator -x

11 comments:

mike said...

i love it, but one problem!
It sits in the middle of my displays (I have two 19" LCD's, and having AWN sitting in the middle means its almost impossible to use :)

Any way I can move it to one window and not have it sit right in the middle?

Neil J. Patel said...

Hi Mike,

ATM there is no way you can do this, as it is hardcoded.
However, I didn't think about dual-displays, so I promise I will look into it when I get some time over the next few days.

mike said...

thanks!

I'm sure you will have plenty of requests for tweaks and additional features in the future!
;)

Anonymous said...

Ubuntu doesn't necessarily need a .deb, but I am also attempting to install on Ubuntu and received c compiler errors, so far I have tried the following -

"apt-get install libglib"
"apt-get install gcc"

now I'm receiving errors that the c compiler can not create executables - i've gotten around this before, just can't remember how - anyone have any input? Thanks!

SS's look great btw, looking forward to getting it installed!

Anonymous said...

well got past that problem - now I'm receiving the following:

"No package 'glib-2.0' found
No package 'gobject-2.0' found
No package 'gtk+-2.0' found
No package 'gdk-2.0' found
No package 'libwnck-1.0' found
No package 'gconf-2.0' found"

I did the following commands to pass the initial issues -

"apt-get install libc6-dev
apt-get install libglib-dev
apt-get install libgtk1.2-dev
apt-get install libxml-parser-perl"

any advice anyone?

Anonymous said...

1327 diggs now :) Hopefully an ubuntu package of it can be released.

Neil J. Patel said...

Hi,
There are no Ubuntu deb's that I know of at the moment. I, however, will be making some of my own for the 0.2 release (which, hopefully will be sometime this weekend).

Reagrding the build problems, you have to install the relevent software development packages for Ubuntu, I think with this command :
$ apt-get install build-essential checkinstall

then you need the following packages:
gtk2-devel, GConf2-devel, libwnck-devel, libX11-devel and xorg-x11-proto-devel.

Anonymous said...

This is look great so far... I've got AWN SVN running nicely on ubuntu edgy.

There is a new option in the latest Beryl that takes thumbnails of running windows for the task list. An option for those using Beryl to pull the thumbnails from Beryl into AWN would be awesome.

rabsteen said...

can't wait for ubuntu deb!

Neil J. Patel said...

Hi Jbus,

I was thinking of that ;). I will look into it after 0.2, as it involves reading alot of code!

Unknown said...

I have built a native AWN x86_64 RPM for openSuSE 10.2 using the SVN as of 3 Feburary 2006. It installs and runs with only a few issues.

I had to add steps to the spec file to force the gconftool-2 and some hacked directory creations. The /usr/share/avant-window-navigator/active and /usr/share/nautilus/patterns are fixed strings in avant-preferences. On SuSE GNOE, KDE and their utilities are installed to /opt (often on another partition, lv or disk). The avant-preferences still runs, but generates errors about these 'missing' directories. Either they could be linked back to the system location by configure, or the locations taken from the OS.

Once openSuSE moves GNOME into /usr, this error would disappear. That is sometime in the distant future. This workaround is needed or that error dialogs will continue to pop up.

The spec file is on my personal website, which melted down over the weekend. The backup server hosting these files is much smaller and slower than the original.