Just thought I'd post this tip here because I've really enjoyed using AWN in the past few weeks (I'm a new convert), but I had to figure out a way to bring Deskbar with me since I'm a Deskbar Junkie. Normally, you'd do that by just keeping a gnome panel around, but I can't stand having clutter at the top and bottom of my screen, so I came up with the following workaround.
![[Q]](engine/grafts/newdefault/images/qq.png "Click to quote this passage; Click again to jump to bottom")
Basically, you use Compiz to place and decorate a windowed version of deskbar using the following steps:
1) Added the regular expression (title=Deskbar Applet & type=normal) to the following fields in the Window Rules plugin:
1. Skip taskbar
2. Skip pager
3. Below
4. Sticky
5. Non maximizable
6. Non closable
2. Skip pager
3. Below
4. Sticky
5. Non maximizable
6. Non closable
2) Added the same regular expression to the Place Windows plugin on the Fixed Window Placement tab and set X=0 and Y=1018 (obviously this will vary based on your screen res).
3) Added the same regular expression to the General Options plugin’s Opacity Settings tab and used an opacity setting of 25426 (yeah…I used the slider).
4) Added the regular expression !(title=Deskbar Applet & type=normal) to the Decoration Windows field of the Window Decoration plugin.
5) Added /usr/lib/deskbar-applet/deskbar-applet -w as a startup program.
6) Added the following bash script to my startup as well:
#/bin/bash
sleep 4
dbus-send --print-reply --type=method_call --dest=org.freedesktop.compiz /org/freedesktop/compiz/winrules/screen0/skiptaskbar_match org.freedesktop.compiz.set string:''
dbus-send --print-reply --type=method_call --dest=org.freedesktop.compiz /org/freedesktop/compiz/winrules/screen0/skiptaskbar_match org.freedesktop.compiz.set string:'title=Deskbar Applet & type=normal'
The last two steps are the messiest part. I hate Gnome’s session management stuff because I can never tell what the hell is going on. For a while, I had two copies of Deskbar running at login. I finally managed to whittle it down to one by moving the DBus script into a separate file. The better way to do it would be to launch Deskbar and send the DBus messages all in the same script; I just got tired of fooling with it.
The DBus messages are necessary because the Window Rules plugin seems to have a problem with newly-started applications. Without the DBus commands, you wind up with Deskbar in your taskbar.
I've had very few problems, although every once in a while Deskbar crashes and has to be restarted. It has only happened a handful of times, so it hasn't been a big problem.
I've got screen shots and whatnot on my blog (http://www.mattkendall.net/blog/), but most of the above is just a copy and paste from the relevant post, so there's no need to visit unless you want to see the screen shot before jumping through the hoops.
Enjoy!
Matt
Matt
