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.

Tags: Linux, skippy, task-switcher, xll

This entry was posted on Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 5:17 am and is filed under Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.