Im not a huge fan of taskbars, and being a Mac user as well has made me like Expose and the general task switcher idea more. I stumbled upon a great little app today called Skippy which is great for getting similar functionality on my Linux machines. Here is a quick run down on getting it installed and running on your Ubuntu system.
First we need to get the Skippy source, which you can find here.

Once you have the source, you will want to ensure you have all the requirements installed. Luckily this can all be taken from the Ubuntu repos.

$ sudo apt-get install xorg-dev
$ sudo apt-get install libxft-dev
$ sudo apt-get install libimlib2-dev

Now untar the Skippy source we downloaded.

$ tar -xjvf skippy-0.5.0.tar.bz2

You should be able to now call make and build the Skippy binary. Once the compile finishes you will need to copy over the default Skippy configuration file into your home directory.

$ cp skippyrc-default /home/craig/.skippyrc

And now you can start Skippy and invoke it with its default key binding being F11.

Enjoy.

XMMS2 is the successor to the XMMS, a great all around media player for Linux. Unlike XMMS, XMMS2 incorporates a client server model, acting as a daemon for client applications to use as their back end. I however prefer just to control it directly from the command line and therefore i find it perfect. The less GUI apps I have open the better!

Here is how to get XMMS2 running on Ubuntu with a bunch of useful plug-ins.
Install the app…

 sudo apt-get install xmms2

Install the plug-ins…

sudo apt-get install xmms2-plugin-all

Launch the daemon…

xmms2-launcher

From this point the xmms2 deamon is now running and you can control it via the xmms2 command. I prefer to store all my media on a separate ubuntu server here at my home. On that server I run another great application called gnump3d, which allows me to stream all my music over my LAN keeping my desktop clean and tidy. The playlists that get provided from gnump3d come in the form of .m3u files. To get this to play with xmms2 you need the xmms-plugin-m3u plugin which comes with the xmms2-plugin-all we installed above. In order to load an m3u play-list we use the addpls command as shown below.

xmms2 addpls recurse.m3u

now that the playlist is loaded we need to play it

xmms2 play

And if the song happens to not be so great we can skip it with…

xmms2 next

And so on..

There are many other useful commands…to see a quick list just type

xmms2

without any other commands.

Enjoy!