Avant Window Navigator (abbreviated AWN or Awn) is a dock-like bar for Linux, which sits on an edge of a user's screen and tracks open windows. Instead of representing open windows as buttons or segments on a bar, it uses large icons on a translucent background to increase readability and add visual appeal. The program was created by Neil J. Patel.
 | |
 A Screenshot of a development version of AWN | |
| Original author(s) | Neil J. Patel |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Awn-core Team |
| Stable release | 0.4.2
/ November 27, 2013 |
| Repository | |
| Written in | C, Python, Vala |
| Platform | Unix-like |
| Available in | English |
| Type | |
| License | |
| Website | https://github.com/p12tic/awn |
Both the appearance and functionality of Avant Window Navigator may be customized, and plugins and applets are available, such as to display the progress of a download in Mozilla Firefox or to control a music player like Rhythmbox.[1] The plugins use the D-Bus IPC system, and applets can be written in C, Python or Vala. A sister project, AWN Extras, is a collection of community-contributed applets and plugins. Releases are usually kept in sync with AWN.
One of the major requirements to run older versions of Avant Window Navigator is a compositing window manager. At least version 0.4.0-2 in the Debian repos has either Metacity, xcompmgr, Compiz, xfwm4, KWin or Mutter as a dependency.[2]
Therefore, the user was required to install a compositor,[3] which could tax performance on low-end systems. Some alternatives were to use a lightweight desktop environment such as Xfce, which has a compositing manager since version 4.2.0, or to enable compositing in Metacity when using GNOME.[4] However, support for non-composited environments is available in version 0.4.0.[5][6]
See also
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References
edit- ^ Awn Extras Archived March 24, 2008, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ "Avant Window Navigator as Debian package".
- ^ Installation (Prerequisites) - AWN Wiki Archived September 3, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Enabling compositing with Metacity Archived January 8, 2010, at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Milestone 0.4 for Awn
- ^ Official release blog post
- Notes
- Jack Wallen (12 Aug 2009) Avant Window Navigator: OS X-like dock on Linux desktop, ghacks.net
- Dmitri Popov (Jan 30, 2009) Managing Tasks with Avant Window Navigator, Linux Magazine online
- Jonathan Roberts (21 July 2007) Gnome Panel Mania, Free Software Magazine column
External links
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- awn on GitHub - Home of AWN project - Maintained by Povilas Kanapickas (reporting of bugs and issues not permitted, last activity 2014-06-11)
- Avant Window Navigator at Launchpad - Project moved to GitHub
- AWN Wiki contains, among other things, installation instructions and a list of FAQs - Site Unknown (as of 2014-12-13)
- AWN Forums - Access to server forbidden (as of 2014-12-13)
- Avant Window Navigator (AWN) Mac OS like Dock in openSUSE at susegeek.com (posting dated 2008-08-02)
- Neil J. Patel's Blog - Blog no longer active (last entry dated 2011-06-12)
- Planet AWN, an aggregation of the developers' weblogs - Site Unknown (as of 2014-12-13)