How To Make An Ubuntu 10.04 Desktop Resemble A Mac (With Elementary, Docky & Gloobus-Preview)

Cairo-Dock used to be mono dependent, but not anymore.

*Disclaimer: I'm not for or against mono, so don't flame me regardless of your stance.

I use Cairo-dock and it's excellent... But sometimes a little buggy. If you can get past that, it's great, and even allows more customization, 3D effects w/ Compiz, etc.

It makes for an easy to use system, and particularly nice with widescreen format screens, where the top and bottom panel bars eat usefull screen real estate. I simply eliminate them entirely (as a back-up to a possible Cairo-dock crash, I keep a small minimal gnome panel, with a drawer for notifications, over to the left as an auto-hide).

All my systems use the same dock configuration, and Cairo-dick theme management allows you to save and create a tar-ball of your theme, for back-up and use on other machines.

BTW,... on HDMI TVs with overscan issues, a useful trick is to create 4 permanent gnome panel bars equal to the amount of overscan on each screen edge. That way, maximized applications do not go off the edge of the screen. You can have as many gnome panels as you want, so you can add back top and bottom bars or hide-able ones... The overscan gome panel bars can be set to 100% transparency for Compiz cube rotation... but create a somewhat "framed" appearance to the desktop when rotating (no a big deal, but worth mentioning).

Quoting:.... configuration, and Cairo-dick theme management ...

The wot?

The theme music that plays when "Jabar, Cairo Dick" comes on the telly. Tuesday nights at 10:00 pm Egyptian time.

Oh, I was thinking of "Cairo Dick, Miami Beach Gigolo".