My Eee Desktop – August 2010

It’s been a few months since I have felt able to post a new entry in this blog’s (supposedly) monthly series, “My Eee Desktop”—mainly because there really haven’t been many changes to make it worthwhile, in my view.

Now, however, thanks to a new software arrival on my 701, I am pleased to post My Eee Desktop for August 2010:

My Eee Desktop - August 2010

If you compare this shot with, say, my last offering back in April, you’ll notice that the top panel has been tweaked a bit—the virtual desktop switcher has now been moved there (you’ll see why in a moment), and there’s no clock (though I enabled it again shortly after this was taken). Conky is still present, of course, but by now you have probably noticed the brash new arrival…

…the Mac OS X-style “dock” along the bottom. This is Avant Window Navigator (AVN), one of a number of Mac-like taskbar/launcher utilities with added composited “eye-candy”, which are available for Linux. Instead of the Mac’s “bouncing icons”, I have applied a “glowing” effect to activated launchers/tasks, which sadly isn’t visible here (it’s nice enough, though).

In addition to the expected application launchers and icons for running programs, AVN also allows for docking “applets”; due to restricted space, I have only enabled the weather and clock applets so far, and I think that’s all I really want from the selection.

Bearing in mind that the Linux on my 701 is still Eeebuntu v3, what happened to v4, which I was hoping to have upgraded to by last time? Well, it’s still “on the way”, though a couple of months back, the distro was renamed Aurora; we are assured they are working feverishly on it as we speak, so hopefully before the year is out, I’ll have plenty of whizzy Aurora stuff to report on here 🙂

Until next time…