Ubuntu :: Getting The Most Out Of Avant Window Navigator As An Alternative "shell"

There are a lot of tutorials online for getting at individual features in AWN (or DockBarX), and I understand that not every feature I'm making use of here is necessarily going to be useful to every user - this is an interface tailored to my workflow. Still, if you're new to AWN, here's a quick tutorial on some of the features you'll want to know about to be able to take full advantage of it. The goal here is to configure AWN as an alternative shell to Unity that retains all the same basic features (and a few extra.)

In this tutorial, despite the default settings on everything else, I'm using the (very trendy, I know) Orta theme and Faenza icons. I don't think it's without reason that these are becoming Gnome's Aqua. They're very readable and clean, and they both include a lot of special features (like Orta's extensive appearance configuration options and Faenza's inclusion of special notification tray icons for common apps like Dropbox and Tomboy.)

Although I know there are perfectly good reasons for both options, I'm going to be assuming in this tutorial that you're using a theme with the window buttons on the left, as this is needed for the Unity-style workflow presented. If you don't know how to change this feature, I'll explain it when I mention gconf-editor below.

Ingredients:

We'll need to add two PPAs to your system - one for AWN and one for DockBarX.

Code:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:awn-testing/ppa
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:dockbar-main/ppa

After that, we'll update the package lists, then install these packages.

Code:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install avant-window-navigator-trunk dockbarx awn-applet-dockbarx xfce4-utils ccsm gconf-editor

[code]....

We're most of the way to a functional-looking desktop, but there's still no Run Dialog when you press Alt+F2, because this is actually a dialog provided by Gnome Panel.Instead, we'll use the one provided by xfce-utils.From the Main Menu at the left, go to Preferences -> Compiz Config Settings Manager (ccsm), then click the Commands tile.

Enter "xfrun4" as Command 0, then click the keybindings tab. Enter whatever keystroke you like, although you might want to make it something other than Alt+F2 to avoid possible conflicts. You could use something like Synapse instead of xfrun4, although xfrun4 will allow you to run more complex commands. Either one will appear when you select Launch from the Main Menu.