Just been rebuilding my Ubuntu Gutsy box after it had really started to crawl – mainly due to me playing with too many bits of software trying to learn new things. The advantages of hosting a separate partition for /home have saved me loads of time and effort as all my data is separate to the OS, so a quick format and within 10 mins I have a shiny new system.

Anyway, one of the things I find essential now on a desktop is AWN (Avant Window Navigator) – it adds that nice Mac dock at the bottom of the screen. The steps to install are as follows:

First add the repository containing AWN:

$sudo pico /etc/apt/sources.list

Add the following lines:

## Avant Window Navigator

deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/syzygy42/ gutsy avant-window-navigator

deb-src http://download.tuxfamily.org/syzygy42/ gutsy avant-window-navigator

Download/install/remove the reaocard

$wget http://download.tuxfamily.org/syzygy42/reacocard.asc

$sudo apt-key add reaocard.asc

$rm reaocard.asc

Install Avant Window Navigator

$sudo apt-get install avant-window-navigator-bzr

For extra applets, just add

$sudo apt-get install awn-core-applets-bzr

Done