Mon Jun 4 2007 - trying Kiba-Dock

I'd read here and there mixed reviews of something called Kiba-Dock. But I made up my mind to road test it when I saw a video demonstration at http://ubuntu1501.blogspot.com/search/label/eyecandy that looked sensational. Flying, sliding, springing, bouncing, pulsing, billiard-ball collisions - the list goes on. At http://www.kiba-dock.org/ there was mention of packages for feisty and a URL. So I lobbed over to http://download.tuxfamily.org/3v1deb/dists/feisty/eyecandy/index.html.

I grabbed the repository details: 'deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/3v1deb feisty eyecandy' from the top of the page and added that to Synaptic under Settings/Repositories. Then I searched for kiba-dock in Synaptic and selected 'kiba-dock' from the resulting list. Synaptic enforced the installation of 2 dependent packages. Fine. I clicked apply and installed all 3.

In the main menu under 'Applications' I now found 'kiba-dock'. I clicked it. Nothing happened. So I clicked 'kiba settings' (also under 'Applications') and enabled one of the plugins in the left hand pane called g-menu (Gnome menu). I clicked 'kiba-dock' again and at last, a dock showed. But contrary to the FAQs at http://www.kiba-dock.org/, I wasn't able to drag any launchers from my applications menu onto it. I'd half expected this. A couple of posters to the Kiba-dock site's forum had this very complaint.

Also I noticed that when I enabled 'akamaru' in kiba settings, the PC slowed to a crawl. CPU usage was mammoth. So there went all the nifty physics tricks and widgetry with the icons. Quite frankly, what I had was a dud. No launchers, no bouncing. But what about that demo site. Why did the dock work for others? I decided to find out.

I returned to that bosker demo page at http://ubuntu1501.blogspot.com/search/label/eyecandy
Some way down the page I found step-by-step instructions for installing kiba-dock, and noticed they bore little resemblance to the Synaptic path I had taken. This was command-line stuff. Ok, I thought nervously, I'll give it a burl. Unfortunately, the first time I tried it, I got a core dump error in the terminal window.

So I sought out all my kiba-dock folders (hidden and visible) and deleted them all, or in one case where I couldn't delete the folder - removed the 2 files within.
Then I tried again, and lo and behold - a nascent blue-striped kiba-dock. And I could drag launchers onto it! And akamaru was enabled by default and all those icon gymnastics came to life, just like in the video demo. Hey presto - kiba-dock in all its glory!

The only slight issue was that if the 'pulse' or 'zoom' effects were enabled on mouseover, a white square flashed briefly over the adjacent icon. This wasn't evident with the first installation via synaptic. But I prefer the dock without zoom - it makes clicking icons a little easier, so the issue hasn't been a show-stopper.