Docks

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Seeyou

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May 1, 2007
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Hey guys

Hoping someone has a suggestion. I'm looking for a dock for Ubuntu. What I want is a centered dock at the bottom of the screen with some app launchers etc and "taskbar" functionality, and another dock on the left of the screen that auto-hides, with some less frequently used apps. You'd think this would be simple, but I've gone through 3 docks so far and none of them fits the bill.

AWN was great - light on RAM/CPU, and minimalistic. However, the latest stable version doesn't support multiple docks.

Cairo is a bloated piece of garbage that seems to be buggy as all hell. It might do what I want, but when it develops a memory leak and suddenly starts taking up 350mb of RAM, that's when I uninstall it.

Docky has come closest to doing what I want, while being light on resources, and it would be perfect except for the mind-blowingly stupid decision they've made not to have an "always on top" mode. I do not want the bottom dock to hide, and I don't want it to take up screen real estate - I essentially want it OVER the desktop. AWN did this perfectly, but alas, no second dock.

I came across something while googling that suggested using compiz to set Docky to always on top automatically - which I did, except that docky either hides itself or takes up real estate automatically no matter how it's positioned.

Any suggestions for how I can accomplish what I'm after, or other docks to try?
 
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Seeyou

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Yeah, I saw that a couple of days ago, but I'm not too fond of running test builds - hence my "latest stable version" comment above.
 
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PaddyTM

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Jan 16, 2007
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Hmm, I'm running Cairo with no problems, steady memory, no leaks.

It's not perfect, but does the job.

Maybe re-install or disable some of the animations?
 
DrJohnZoidberg

DrJohnZoidberg

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Jul 24, 2006
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Is there a specific reason you want your dock always on top? If you running your browser or whatever fullscreen, then you going to have this content blocked out the whole time. I'm running docky and use the "Intellihide" function - it is by far the most reliable dock that I have used (i have tried awn and cairo dock). I'll try and fiddle with some compiz options and let you know if I figure anything out.
 
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adrianx

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Jun 30, 2008
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I know that this docky does what you want, but you are probably not keen on ppa :
Code: 
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:docky-core/ppa && sudo apt-get upgrade && sudo apt-get install docky

Edit: The only time that it does hide, is when you run something in fullscreen mode.
 
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Seeyou

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There is actually a very simple solution to get the current, stable Docky to stay "always on top" - I posted a link to the explanation above.

@timvdwest: it's a small thing, but when the dock is in any of the hide modes, that short delay between moving the mouse down to the dock area and having the dock pop up, and then moving to the correct icon, really annoys me when I'm trying to get something done fast :)
 
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