the dawn of AWN

The Avant Window Navigator (AWN) is a dock for program launchers. It sits at the bottom of your screen and contains a row of program and location icons approximately 36px high. It's possible to tailor a Gnome panel so that it resembles AWN to a degree - uncheck the 'expand' option, increase size to 36px, set the background as a transparent colour (or image), and of course - add some program launchers. But AWN is prettier, with a slicker 3D background. and it has effects on hover. The best are 'squish' and 3D twirl. For a full list, see:
http://njpatel.blogspot.com/ (Sunday, 7 October 2007)

How to install it? Here are the instructions, taken from:
http://wiki.awn-project.org/index.php?title=DistributionGuides

Reacocard's Ubuntu Gutsy Repository

Add these lines to the bottom of your /etc/apt/sources.list

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

Then do this in a terminal:

wget http://download.tuxfamily.org/syzygy42/reacocard.asc
sudo apt-key add reacocard.asc
rm reacocard.asc
sudo apt-get update

Now to install AWN, use Synaptic or enter this in a terminal:

sudo apt-get install avant-window-navigator-bzr awn-core-applets-bzr

The applets are useful because they include a trash bin, media controls and a workspace indicator.

With AWN installed, you can do away with the shortcut icons from your top panel, delete your bottom panel completely and add a window list to the top panel. You can also auto-hide the dock, but I prefer to have it showing, since there's plenty of room on a 1900x1200 resolution screen.

One difficulty I had to surmount was adding location launchers - i.e. links to my home folder and to other drives. You can create these launchers through the the AWN manager (under system menu), but NB - the launchers will not display until you close down (right click top left of dock - close) and restart AWN (under the Applications/Accessories menu).