After install all those eye candy stuff, beryl, gdesklets and everything else, it looked quite nice. Amazingly, there weren’t any memory killers or frequent crashing apps. However, there is no doubt that apple Mac OS was/is the best eye candy OS ever. I don’t have to tell you that one of the most appealing applets is the icon doc at the bottom of the screen. So, since lot of people have their eyes on this, those are ported to many platforms (rather recoded not ported).

Now, It’s time for me to go for something instead of modeling the gnome panel itself. cairo-dock, it’s my choice. Installing cairo-dock quite easy if you have all the development libraries. There is no need for me to explain all the steps there – Just follow this link : http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=302570. He has explained it step by step. The installation/compilation will go smoothly.

However even after you compiled the application, unfortunately there will be some errors. The first one is icons. Probably, what you’ll get will be some blank icons. The SVG files inside the tar ball doesn’t show up correctly. You might be already knowing that SVG files are text files. So, what you have to do is open the icons in ‘vi’ or ‘gedit’ or whatever, then just look at the source of the image. Most probably around the bottom of the file, there will be a link to a PNG file. Actually there will be two links linking to the same file. Just change the link to a valid path for a PNG image. Then you are ready to go.Recompile the application, then just run it. Then with any luck you’ll see the icons

Ah! I forgot to tell you about changing the icons/launchers. You have to change the g_aIcons array. It’s at the beginning of the file. The first parameter is the image, then the Text displayed, and finally the command. Make the display text as short as possible, otherwise those will overlap with each other and it’ll look kinda fuzzy or more to the point ugly.

After all things you have a working cairo-dock. Then the next step is to add it to the startup. I used the gnome session control panel, but however since I’m also loading beryl at the startup, cairo-dock used to crash. So, I removed this from the startup, and changed the beryl loading script(Look at my beryl installation post). So, the final script looks like this.


#!/bin/sh
beryl-manager
sleep 7
beryl&
sleep 7
/media/sda5/Software/cairo/cairo-dock/start-cairo-dock.sh


Now try restarting the Xorg, it’ll work like a pro. Even, it works as it should be, there are few problems regarding this. I usually use Alt + F4 to quit applications. So, when I keep quiting applications, if I pressed one more additional Alt + F4, damn… the cairo-dock will get closed and also if you pressed the “Show Desktop” button the cairo-dock will get minimized.

So, what do we do now? Don’t worry I have a small(small as in very small) hack to get rid of that problem. Open cairo-dock.c in vi(or whatever). Search for “gtk_window_new”(There is only one instance. It’ll be around the line 1180-1190). Change the second parameter of the function to “GTK_WINDOW_POPUP”. So, the line should look like this :


pWindow = gtk_window_new (GTK_WINDOW_POPUP);


Then, recompile the code and restart the dock. And finally you have another cool gadget to impress the people .

Tags: AiGLX, Beryl, Cairo-Dock, Linux