For those who are familiar with the Mac OSX Leopard operating system, it uses a system dock at the bottom of the screen as a home for your open and frequently used applications. For the past year or so I have used a similar tool on all my Ubuntu machines called Avant Window Manager. Avant got the job done, but didn’t feel as polished as the dock in OSX. Recently I discovered a new dock for the GNOME desktop that works extremely well. It is called GNOME Do, and is based off of the GNOME launch box.

I will cover installing it in Ubuntu 9.04, but for other distros or to build from source please visit the GNOME Do Download page.

I used the PPA repo to install GNOME Do on my system, so there are a few steps to accomplish this. First, add the following lines to your /etc/apt/sources.list file

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/do-core/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/do-core/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

Then add the PPA key for the repository.

# gpg --no-default-keyring --keyring /tmp/gnome-do.keyring --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv A5D19FDCAA6ABB440CD3464628A8205077558DD0
# gpg --no-default-keyring --keyring /tmp/gnome-do.keyring --export --armor A5D19FDCAA6ABB440CD3464628A8205077558DD0 | sudo apt-key add -
# rm /tmp/gnome-do.keyring

Lastly, open your package manager and search for “gnome-do” or my method is to install it from the command line

# sudo aptitude update && sudo aptitude install gnome-do

Once installed, you will find the new launcher under Applications > Accessories > GNOME Do.

The first time you use it, it will be in “Glass” mode. Right click on the window and open the preferences. On the Appearance tab, you will be able to change the theme to “Docky”. This will open GNOME Do in a dock mode, similar to OSX’s dock. From here you can set it to start automatically when you log in, and adjust the hiding preferences. My setup uses “Intellihide” which seems to be working well when I have full screen terminal windows or other applications open, something that Avant never really handled well. You can also enable “Docklets” which are small active icons in the dock that can, for example, grab weather information or other data. There is also a plugin that will allow you to update social networking sites, such as Twitter, right from the dock.

Another really cool feature of GNOME Do is the fact that you can quickly search and launch things on your computer with easy shortcuts.

I encourage those who use Linux to give this helpful tool a try, and post your experiences in the comments.