Avant Window Navigator 0.2.4 on Fedora 8 x86_64

In Fedora repos, there is AWN of version 0.2.1, it’s too old (3 months). Compiling from source is not too hard. Go to download awn and awn-extras. You should have no problem with awn, For compiling awn-extras, I have few notes for you, I will list them later.

My feeling about AWN

It’s great, although one or two applets can’t work. Check this screenshot out,

This is my current desktop environment, one Gnome panel and AWN, that’s all.

The first one icon is the MiMenu like Main Menu in Gnome panel, then Last.fm Player Applet. It works very well, it was playing music in this screenshot, so it showed a album cover. Next one is a launcher for Firefox program. The following four icons are launchers as well, which are aMSN, Gnome Terminal, Yumex and Fusion Icon.

A separator follows, then awn-manager, which is not a applet or launcher, it is a program listed in a place like Window List in Gnome panel. Another separator, then a Shiny Switcher (desktop switcher), Stacks Trasher, Volume Control, Clock/Calendar Applet (supports Google Calendar), Battery Applet and, lastly, Quit-Logoff applet.

Unfortunately, Notification Area applet doesn’t work well on my Fedora 8. Neither does Mail applet (supports Gmail).

Compiling notes for awn-extras

While configure

If you saw

No package 'awn' found

then run the following, instead

PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig ./configure

While make

If you saw

./awn_extras.override:25:38: error: libawn-extras/awn-extras.h: No such file or directory

then modify src/libawn-extras/bindings/python/Makefile, find (line# 326 in my case)

AM_CFLAGS = \
    $(PYTHON_CPPFLAGS) \
    $(PYGTK_CFLAGS) \
    $(PYCAIRO_CFLAGS) \
    $(AWN_CFLAGS) \
    -I$(top_builddir)/src/libawn-extras \
    -DHAVE_PYCAIRO \
    $(NULL)

make it be

AM_CFLAGS = \
    $(PYTHON_CPPFLAGS) \
    $(PYGTK_CFLAGS) \
    $(PYCAIRO_CFLAGS) \
    $(AWN_CFLAGS) \
    -I$(top_builddir)/src \
    -DHAVE_PYCAIRO \
    $(NULL)

You should have no more problem.
.

While using

If you saw something like

Creating new applet :None uid:None
Creating new applet :/usr/local/lib/awn/applets/lastfm.desktop uid:1203667530

** (awn-applet-activation:9312): WARNING **: No exec path found in desktop file None

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/lib/awn/applets/lastfm/lastfmapplet.py", line 25, in 
    import awn
ImportError: No module named awn

then run (as root)

ln -s /usr/local/lib/python2.5/site-packages/awn /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/awn