Avant Window Navigator (AWN) 0.4 Available - See What's New [Linux]

After a few months of development, AWN (Avant Window Navigator) 0.4 is available for beta testing.

In case you don't know, Avant Window Navigator (Awn) is a dock-like bar which sits at the bottom of the screen (or at least it used to, read on!). It has support for launchers, task lists, and third party applets.

The new AWN 0.4 comes with lots of new features, such as:

1. Finally you can position the dock to the left, top or right side of the screen. You can also adjust the distance from the corner. This also works great with multi-screen.

2. New styles:

-Curved:

-Floaty:

-Corner (edgy):

(the element on the left can be any applet you want)

- Extended mode (AWN can be extended to the whole width of the screen). This basically means you can use AWN as a whole gnome panel for instance. Take a look at the following screencast:

3. Auto-hide has been completely revised. It now includes three modes, including the transparent mode which you can use to set the opacity to partially show/hide AWN and intellihide: automatically determines if the dock should be hidden or not.

4. Launchers only mode: allows you to have a dock with shortcuts to launch applications without a list of open windows.

5. Grouping windows: When multiple windows of one application are present, they are automatically grouped under a single icon. There is always the possibility to interact with all the windows.

6. Enhanced icons: the icons have been beautified (or de-uglified, as you wish :) ) and also you are able to move the icons using drag-and-drop.

7. When an applet is being loaded, there is now a little animation in a circle to show that the applet is being run.

8. The applets now have the opportunity to take the whole bar to display information. Inspired also a feature of Gnome-Do:

9. A new settings manager called Awn-settings (Awn-manager no longer exists).

Installing Avant Window Navigator 0.4 Beta (0.3.9.1) In Ubuntu Linux

Then, open a terminal and paste the following to add AWN testing PPA repository:

-For Ubuntu Intrepid and Jaunty:

sudo bash -c "echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/awn-testing/ppa/ubuntu ubuntu_version main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list"
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys BF810CD5

Replace ubuntu_version with jaunty or intrepid.


-For Ubuntu Karmic and Lucid:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:awn-testing

Then, to install it (for any Ubuntu version):

-If you are upgrading from an older version, do (note: the older version must also be -trunk):

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

-If you are installing AWN for the first time:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install avant-window-navigator-trunk

To also install some additional applets:

sudo apt-get install python-awn-trunk python-awn-extras-trunk awn-applets-python-extras-trunk awn-applets-c-extras-trunk

Update: Avant Window Navigator 0.4 final has been released. To install it in Ubuntu Lucid, simply paste this in a terminal:

sudo apt-get install avant-window-navigator

For something similar to AWN, see also Cairo Dock v2.1 and Gnome DO / Docky.

Release notes and image credits: Informatique de Julien

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