The 5th time is the charm, as I finally was able to install Avant Window Navigator from subversion today on Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) with Beryl:

Neil Patel is doing some really innovative work with GNOME right now, from creating Avant Window Navigator to Tracker to including metadata information in to Nautilus. You really must check out his blog to see his work in progress on these projects.

Back to Avant Window Navigator: AWN replaces one of your panels, and shows both what applications are open and a launcher for other applications.

I had some difficulty getting AWN installed even after reading this thread on Ubuntu Forums and following the instructions on the AWN Wiki. In the end, I was able to get it installed using Subversion, but I had to change one line from the wiki:

The wiki’s last step says:

cd data<br /> gconftool-2 --install-schema-file=avant-window-navigator.schemas

But there was no avant-window-navigator.schemas file in the /data directory. So I typed:

gconftool-2 --install-schema-file=avant-window-navigator.schemas.in

which was a file in the /data directory, and voila, AWN!

I made notes on the screenshot on Flickr, but on the left of the dock are the launcher applications, and on the 4 icons on the right side are the applications currently opened.

I removed the bottom panel once AWN was running, and moved my workspace switcher, show desktop button and trash icon to the panel at the top.

Overall, I’m quite impressed with AWN. It scales the icons beautifully, I like how they move when highlighted, and I love how it’s both a launcher and a switch application tool. Hats off to the developer for this one. It takes some getting used to not seeing a panel at the bottom of the screen after using GNOME all these years, but I have a feeling I’ll adjust.