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Plank, A Very Simple Yet an Elegant Dock for GNU/Linux

A "dock" that lets you keep your running programs or application shortcuts are very popular these days. Although it was Apple who introduced it first with their earlier versions of Mac OS... but since Gnome does praise Apple's way of designing UI... having a "dock" is a must these days it seems, especially for the Gnome Geeks :P.

Anyhow, the Plank dock is created by the Docky Core Team thus it inherits a bit of this and that from docky as well. It is written using a new programming language called Vala (created by Gnome developers) which has a reputation of being able to create software that use less memory requirements.


Although you won't get a lot of features with Plank but you can add/remove apps or shortcuts and make it automatically hide when not needed, etc nonetheless. Once installed you should be able to access it via: Applications -> Accessories -> Dock Plank.

In Ubuntu 10.10 and 11.04 you can install Plank by issuing the below command.
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ricotz/docky
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install plank

2 comments:

  1. Doesn't work.

    someone@someone-desktop:~$ sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ricotz/docky
    Executing: gpg --ignore-time-conflict --no-options --no-default-keyring --secret-keyring /etc/apt/secring.gpg --trustdb-name /etc/apt/trustdb.gpg --keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg --primary-keyring /etc/apt/trusted.gpg --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80/ --recv 38AE4F60E356CE050312FA1775CFD31C9E5DB0C8
    gpg: requesting key 9E5DB0C8 from hkp server keyserver.ubuntu.com
    gpg: key 9E5DB0C8: "Launchpad PPA for Rico" not changed
    gpg: Total number processed: 1
    gpg: unchanged: 1
    someone@someone-desktop:~$ sudo apt-get update
    E: Type 'ain' is not known on line 3 in source list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gnome3-team-gnome3-natty.list
    E: The list of sources could not be read.

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  2. @weberc2,

    Well it looks like your "Gnome 3 PPA" is the troublesome repository which gives this error.

    So the best thing to do is to wait for few mins and try again. If it still exists, then try temporarily disabling the Gnome3 PPA and try installing Plank ...

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