Installing Cairo-Dock on the Acer Aspire One

Cairo-Dock is an OSX-ish application laucher that you could place on your desktop to replace your panel. Or if you're like me, you could have both and will make your desktop similar to this [It is recommended to have at least 1GB of RAM though]:

Hopefully, it is fairly easy once you have activated the standard XFCE desktop and set aside the Acer modified desktop, instructions on how to do that could be found here. Of course, this is assuming that you already have added the new RPM-Fusion repositories, if you haven't yet, then simple instructions could be found here.

Once we have the standard XFCE desktop, we need to activate Compiz [it is a program pre-installed and can make great 3D effects on your desktop] by downloading Fusion-Icon. Just go to the Terminal and then type in:

sudo yum install fusion-icon

After installation, we can run it by pressing Alt+F2 on your keyboard and then typing in fusion-icon and then click Run. You will know if it is successful if you see a new blue icon on your system tray [where the clock, etc. is]. You can right click it for you to configure some effects that you might like to enable. If you might ask and be interested what Emerald theme is, it is a theme manager and you can get themes for it by opening the package manager and searching for emerald-themes. Later on this guide, we are going to add fusion-icon and cairo-dock so that they would run automatically upon startup.

Now that we have fusion-icon, all we need to do is to get the cairo-dock RPM from any of the mirrors listed in here. After downloading it, just double click it and it will automatically installed. You can find it in you menu under System, named Cairo-Dock. Click on it and then the dock will appear in your desktop. Right click it so that you can personalize it and adding applications is as easy as dragging and dropping .desktop files from /usr/share/applications to the dock, or you can create manually configured lauchers/subdocks/etc. if you want.

Themes for it are also available, try searching some at http://rpm.pbone.net/ by typing in cairo-dock-themes. I got my themes there but I forgot the direct link, but I'll update this later.

Now if you notice, fusion-icon and cairo-dock does not open upon startup. This can be easily remedied by opening a Terminal and typing:

xfce4-autostart-editor

A new window should pop up and just add those two applications, the commands being cairo-dock and fusion-icon, respectively. And that's pretty much it.

Have fun on your new desktop!