How To Install And Configure Tint2 Using a GUI [ Panel / Taskbar for Linux ]

1. Introduction

Tint2 is a lightweight panel/taskbar intentionally made for Openbox3, but should also work with other window managers such as Gnome.

Tint2 features:

* panel with taskbar, systray, clock and battery status
* easy to customize : color/transparency on font, icon, border and background
* pager like capability : send task from one workspace to another, switch workspace
* multi-monitor capability : one panel per monitor, show task from current monitor
* customize mouse event
* window manager's menu

Tint2 is very configurable, like I told you above, but this is done via config files meaning you have to use a text editor for customizing basically... everything, which might confuse 'non-geeks', but we will cover a way to do all the configuring via a GUI tool, so keep reading.

2. Installing Tint2 In Ubuntu

Tint2 has an Ubuntu PPA repository, so we must add this repo so we can proceed to installing. Open a terminal and paste the following commands:

sudo sh -c "echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/killeroid/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list"

If you use Ubuntu Intrepid, you can replace "jaunty" with "intrepid" in the command above.
Now, let's also add the GPG key for this repository:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys C26CCF8E

And finally, install Tint2:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install tint2

At this point, the installation is completed and you can proceed to editing the config files which are located in the following folder on your computer:

~/.config/tint2

You can edit these config files for yourself, or read and and install an application which will automatically set up all those files. To edit them for yourself, read the documentation from HERE.

Configuring Tint2 Using Tintwizard (w/ GUI)

Tintwizard aims to provide an easy way to change the appearance of tint2. Through an easy-to-use graphical user interface, you can generate configs and apply to them tint2. You can see some examples of Tint2 configs produced with Tintwizard, HERE.

If your Tint2 configuration file is ~/.config/tint/tintrc and not ~/.config/tint2/tint2rc, you need to rename all the "tint2" & "tint2rc" terms to "tint" & "tintrc" (you can simply use Gedit - Find and Replace to achieve this).

To run Tintwizard:

Download Tintwizard and place tintwizard.py and tintwizard.conf in any folder, open a terminal and navigate to that folder and run the following command:

chmod +x tintwizard.py

Now you can run tintwizard.py, either through a temrinal:

./tintwizard.py

Or just double clicking tintwizard.py

4. Running Tint2

tint2 -c ~/.config/tint2/tint2rc

Using the -c switch, you can use a different config file.

If you want to run Tint2 when you computer starts, in Gnome, go to System > Preferences > Startup Applications, click on "Add" and in the command field enter the above command, changing the ~/.config/tint2/tint2rc to the path of your desired config file.

For various issues with Compiz (and fixes), see the Tint2 FAQ which explains in detail how to solve those.

Thanks to Penguin Inside for pointing out Tintwizard.