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