The Avant Window Navigator is growing very fast. Other day I saw that the guys had implemented a sort of filemanager embed in the dock and a kind of main-menu replacement, and that is very impressive, the appearance and usability are very good too. There are also some cool applets available.

But unfortunately (or not) this dock needs a composite environment to work correctly, otherwise you will get a black background in the dock. Seems that everyone thinks that only with Compiz/Beryl it will work correctly, but if that is true only those who have a Nvidia, ATI or Intel graphic card could use the dock.

If you don’t have one of the cards mentioned above but want to try the awn anyway, you can use the xcompmgr, it will add the composite needed for your desktop and it doesn’t require 3D acceleration support.

$ sudo apt-get install xcompmgr

Just install the avant-window-navigator-bzr following the instructions on this post and then:

$ xcompmgr && avant-window-navigator

I suppose it is slower than if you had a 3D card, of course. And you may notice some screen glitches wile using xcompmgr, but well, nothing is perfect ;)