Many of you have seen how to make a Mac-like dock bar along the bottom of your screen.
This guide will teach you how to create the Vista sidebar on your Ubuntu GNOME installation. I really wanted to try this as an experiment, while not wanting to give up my lower bar.
The first step is to right-click on either panel (taskbar) on the top or bottom of your screen. A menu will pop up, giving you several options. Click on “New Panel”. This will make another panel on the right or left side of your screen. This is the panel you will use to make the sidebar.
Once you have the bar in the position of your choice, right-click on the new panel and choose “Properties”. In order for it to look “Vista-ish” you will need to make it wider, so widen it to it’s maximum width of 120 pixels. You can also change the orientation of this bar on your screen from within the same tab, as well as enable auto-hiding, which will hide the taskbar when not in use.
You may have noticed that there is no transparency in your taskbar. Click on the “Background” tab at the top of the “Properties” window. Click on “Use solid color”. This will enable the transparency, and will also allow you to change the amount of transparency as well.
Next, you can right-click on the panel one more time, and add items to it via “Add to Panel”. Here’s a screen shot of how mine looks after I have customized it:
What you see here (from top to bottom) is: Deskbar, Tomboy, System Monitor, Clock (set to UTC so I don’t miss any Ubuntu meetings), and the weather applet.
Something I found on the system monitor applet is a system information page:
Who knew? You will also get the name of your computer at the top, but I edited that part out for security reasons… Here’s another nifty item I came across… the “Take Screenshot” application allows you to take a pic of your entire screen, or any open application.
