Official Website: https://code.google.com/p/avant-window-navigator/ (old)
and https://launchpad.net/awn (new)
Current version: 0.4.2
Released: 2013-11-27
Installation
AWN was removed from Ubuntu some time ago due to build errors against newer libs and is currently only available in Debian OldStable (Squeeze). I thought I would try to install it anyway, so I enabled the repository:
http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ squeeze mainThe issue with Debian is that AWN depends on packages removed formNever one to shy away from a challenge, I immediately decided to try and get it installed by instead adding the Ubuntu AWN testing ppa (for Ubuntu Saucy 13.10):
debian altogether. IIRC the most problematic one is libgladeui or
something like that. This wouldn’t be solved without significant work
on the AWN side. I’m currently doing a large rewrite of AWN which
will, among other things, solve this issue. The rewrite is being done
privately at the moment – completely broken builds do not benefit
anyone.
http://ppa.launchpad.net/awn-testing/ppa/ubuntu saucy main
apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys BF810CD5Running AWN
Avant Window Navigator had appeared in the Accessories menu and Awn Settings had appeared in settings. I clicked on the launcher from Accessories and this is what I got:
It looked like one of the applets had crashed. It didn’t matter what I did, it wouldn’t restart. I went into the preferences and it looked like it was only the preferences applet launcher itself, so I removed it from the dock and just used right-click to access the preferences dialog.
Customization
It’s possible to customize just about every aspect of AWN’s appearance from where it sits on the screen to the size and position of the dock and launchers. There are some preset themes to choose from, or you can customize your own by choosing your own colours (with alpha transparency), use the current GTK theme or apply a background image. Window icons can be grouped or not and can use the ‘best quality’ icon or the icon that the window provides. If you right-click on a launcher icon, you can further customize it by choosing your own image file. Hover over an icon to see the Window list. Launchers can be dragged along the dock to change position.
Features/Applets
Even though I installed the applets-common package, the only available applets were the launchers, a spacer and the preferences applet that crashed. I searched in Synaptic for awn-applet and found quite a few that offered nearly everything a user might want to turn their dock into a more fully fledged panel. Here are a few notable ones:
1) Awn Main Menu applet
There are a couple of different menu applets, but this one was a pleasant change from the norm, displaying icons in a launcher style arrangement
2) Notification Area
I had to remove the notification area from the XFCE Panel before this would work. It displayed the notification icons in a grid pattern. If I added an expander in front of it I could get the notification area to sit on the far edge.
3) Clock/Calendar
This purports to have Google Calendar integration, but this aspect didn’t work at all. However, you do get quite a nice calendar and clock arrangement:
Stability/Resource Use
Although some applets crashed, this is probably to be expected with an out of date application using some old libraries. Nevertheless, once up and running it seemed stable enough and didn’t crash or appear to cause any wider system instability. When running, it appeared to use about 26MB with the 3 applets mentioned above, whilst the CPU usage initially rose to 6%, it soon idled back at 1-2% after launch.
Overall impressions
AWN does a good job of being a dock. Once you get the ppa added to your system repositories, installing it is fairly straightforward, the download is small and it doesn’t appear to a memory or resource hog. It can be positioned wherever you want and themed how you see fit.
On the flip side, some of the applets are certainly buggy and if you intend to use it to completely replace the XFCE panel, you might find some of the applets a bit ‘chunky’ in comparison, with no means of altering the size of indicator applets save for reducing the size of the entire dock.
The original developer was poached by Ubuntu to work on Unity and you can see his influence. Although the current packages in Debian are very out of date, the ones in the ppa only date back to November 2013 and development is purportedly in progress. It perhaps isn’t as dead as first appeared.
Category
|
Score /10 |
|---|---|
| Ease of installation | 6 |
| Customization | 8 |
| Features | 7 |
| Stability | 6 |
| Overall | 7 |
Final Screenshots
As the original developer of AWN now works for Canonical on the Unity desktop project, I thought it would be appropriate to try and recreate the Unity look in XFCE (just for laughs of course!):
And here it using the XFCE Application Finder as the 'menu':
Copyright (c) RichJack 2014
Written with StackEdit.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
No comments:
Post a Comment