Dave's Tech Blog » 2008 » April

Make your Ubuntu look kind of like Mac OS X

I was recently looking for a dockbar solution for my new Ubuntu 8.04 Beta machine. There are a few out there to pick from. One that I’ve checked out before was called AWN, but I didn’t like its animations. Then I found this other one called Cairo Dock. Here’s a video of Cairo Dock in action:

Cairo Dock comes with a lot of really cool looking themes too. I went ahead and took screenshots of all of them to show you. But first, how to install this program.

To install Cairo Dock:

Visit this website. (Note: If you are running Firefox 3, you will be prompted to make a certificate exception before you can view the site). You’ll be presented with a page that looks something like this:

Note the two links I’ve highlighted in red. You need to download both of those deb files, and save them to your desktop. Once they are there, double-click on the main cairo-dock deb file to install the base program, then after it’s finished installing, double-click on the plugins deb file to install the neat extras.

You’re done with the installation.

To run Cairo-Dock you can find a shortcut to it in your Applications>System menu. Try cairo-dock out to see if it runs well on your system (as this program is dependent on Compiz in order to look nice and transparent like glass). To play with the cairo-dock settings you just right-click on the dock bar and you’ll get some menus that you can explore on your own. Nothing too technical. The “Manage Themes” menu option will allow you to change the docks appearance and behavior to preset themes.

How to auto-load Cairo Dock:

Once you’re familiar with the dock and decide you’d like to use it regularly, you can remove your other task bar just by right clicking on it and clicking “Remove Panel”. I don’t think you’ll miss it, but that’s just my opinion.

To auto-load cairo-dock at login, goto System>Preferences>Sessions.

You’ll be shown a new window listing programs that auto run at login. All you need to do is add cairo-dock to the list by clicking the “Add” button.

Once you click add, name your item “Cairo Dock” and in the command box type “cairo-dock” without the quotes. You can leave the comments field blank. Then click OK. That’s it! Now when you login in, Cairo Dock will autorun for you.

As mentioned before, I took screenshots of all the themes that are included with Cairo. Well, here they are. Enjoy!