Cairo Dock (Glx Dock) 2.2 Beta Officially Released With Lots Of Cool New Features

The first official beta of Cairo Dock (GLX Dock) 2.2 was released with a huge list of new features and improvements - we already posted most of them on WebUpd8, but we'll do a small recap. If you're using the Cairo Dock weekly PPA, you already have all these features. But maybe you're not aware of some of them, so read on!

Even though the version in the Cairo Dock (now GLX-Dock) weekly PPA is beta 3, this is actually the first official beta of Cairo Dock 2.2 as announced by Fabounet (the main Cairo Dock developer).

What's new in Cairo Dock (GLX Dock) 2.2 beta

2 new autohide modes have been added to Cairo Dock 2.2: "hide whenever the dock overlaps the active window" and "hide whenever the dock overlaps any window". You can use this with animations such as move-down, semi-transparent or fade-out.

These 2 new autohide modes are really smart too: if for instance someone talks to you in Pidgin, the Pidgin icon becomes visible even though the dock is hidden.

Another important new feature in Cairo Dock 2.2 is the integration of the Me Menu and Messaging Menu applets. Besides this, Cairo Dock can now be used in a panel mode so you can easily replace the Gnome panels with Cairo Dock. Further more, you can now run multiple instances of Cairo Dock (so you can have multiple docks / panels).

Other small enhancements: all the themes have been polished, you can now manage tasks in the Clock's calendar, use tiny URLs in the Drop-and-Share applet, the Dustbin applet handles all the drives and many more.

Install GLX Dock / Cairo Dock 2.2 beta in Ubuntu

To install Cairo Dock 2.2. beta in Ubuntu, simply copy/paste the following commands in a temrinal (see the commands for your Ubuntu version):

For Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala or Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cairo-dock-team/weekly
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cairo-dock cairo-dock-plug-ins

For Ubuntu 8.04 and 9.04:

echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/cairo-dock-team/weekly/ubuntu $(lsb_release -sc) main ## Cairo-Dock-PPA-Weekly" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys E80D6BF5
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cairo-dock cairo-dock-plug-ins

Note: the video in this post only shows a few of the new features in Cairo Dock 2.2 as well as some older features overview! Try out Cairo Dock 2.2 for yourself to see all the new features in action!


More info and a couple more videos @ Glx-Dock.org