Michael Dolan Dot Com

Wednesday, February 21st, 2007

More on Eye Candy: Awn on OpenSuse 10.2 (with Gnome/XGL)

I’ve had two pieces of eye candy on my mind lately – Beryl and Awn. Beryl has some cool features like making your close windows burn up in flames. Very cool looking. Well, I chose to try out Awn today. I installed it on my OpenSUSE 10.2 system which has admittedly ‘outdated’ hardware specs (1.6Ghz AMD Duron), but a decent graphics card (nVidia 5200) and is attached to a beautiful Samsung 941BW 19″ widescreen monitor. So if the eye candy works, it at least looks like a Vista Premium ;-).

Like I said, I’m using OpenSUSE 10.2 for this but for some reason could only find packages ready for FC6 or Ubuntu… odd. Anyway, there are two ways to install: 1) tarball and 2) svn. I used both b/c I followed version 1) and then decided I’d rather get the latest version from source to fix a couple bugs I found. I would recommend path 2) to anyone capable. Both paths are actually very simple if you already have XGL working.

BTW, during this entire process, I quickly realized why I’ve held onto Gentoo for so long… I’d rather watch OpenOffice compile from source than spend 1/4th of that time using YaST. I guess if you’re ‘new to Linux’, YaST is probably awesome, but despite being impressed by the performance speedups, over time, YaST has become bloated to the point where I can go get a snack while I start it up. Anyway, back to Awn.

Steps to setup on OpenSUSE 10.2:

1) Download tarball here

2) Unzip it: # gunzip -c avant-window-navigator-0.1.1-2.tar.gz | tar xvf -

3) cd into directory # cd avant-window-navigator-0.1.1/

4) C-M-MI as root: # ./configure then, # make, then # make install

* Note: I had an error at configure to install dependencies (gconf-devel and libwnck-devel) although the error doesn’t specify that you need the dev versions (I already had both non-dev binary packages installed)

5) cd into data dir: # cd data then type: # gconftool-2 --install-schema-file=avant-window-navigator.schemas and you should get output indicating success

6) Click on the Computer (start) button, choose “More Applications” and under newly installed, you should see “Avant Window Navigator” or type in # avant-window-navigator in a terminal as your desktop user. To set preferences, in a term type # avant-preferences as your user.

—— Subversion Method —–

Another option is to install from svn – this gets you the latest bits (which I recommend):

1) # mkdir [svndir]/awn

2) # svn checkout http://avant-window-navigator.googlecode.com/svn/trunk awn

3) # cd awn and then as root # ./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr && make && make install

** Note: I had to install intltool, gnome-common, gnome-desktop-devel, gnome-vfs2-devel, and libgnome-devel with all their dependencies to proceed… miss portage…

4) exit root, cd into data dir: # cd data" then type: # gconftool-2 --install-schema-file=avant-window-navigator.schemas.in and you should get output indicating success

5) Click on the Computer (start) button, choose “More Applications” and under newly installed, you should see “Avant Window Navigator” or type in # avant-window-navigator in a terminal. To set preferences, in a term type # avant-preferences.

Tweaking Awn: You can tweak Awn settings using # gconf-editor then going into /apps/avant-window-navigator and in there you will see a number of options to tweak. One that you may want to start with is the launchers key under “window_manager” -> that is where you can setup all the default icons to appear in Awn at start.