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NameBar 0.5 has been released today and comes with lots of new features, most important being that it now supports themes for the maximize/minimize/close buttons. Three themes have been included to the default installation: New Wave-ish, Human-ish and Dust-ish:

New Wave-ish Namebar

Human-ish NameBar

Dust-ish namebar


In case you don't know, NameBar shows the icon and the name of the focused window on the Gnome panel, as well as buttons for minimizing/(un)maximizing and closing the window, ideal for a Netbook (although I also use it for my Desktop PC because I gain some screen real-estate by using NameBar).


Other features include: a new option to customize the text color if the window is focused or unfocused, you can now bring up the window by simply clicking on NameBar. And besides these new features, a lot of bugs have been fixed.


Install NameBar 0.5:

1. Install python-gnome2-desktop

For Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install python-gnome2-desktop


2. Download NameBar 0.5, extract it and copy namebar.py to /usr/bin/ and GNOME_NameBarApplet.server to /usr/lib/bonobo/servers

From the command line, simply open a terminal, navigate to the folder where you extracted NameBar 0.5 and:
sudo cp namebar.py /usr/bin
sudo cp GNOME_NameBarApplet.server /usr/lib/bonobo/servers


3. Copy the content of themes to /usr/share/namebar/themes (or alternatively copy them to ~/.namebar/themes):
sudo mkdir -p /usr/share/namebar/themes
sudo cp themes/* /usr/share/namebar/themes


4. Restart the Gnome Panel:
sudo killall gnome-panel


5. If you don't have Namebar added to your Gnome Panel, right click a panel and select "Add to panel" and add NameBar.


Update: here is also a NameBar 0.5 Ubuntu .deb:

gnome-namebar-applet_0.5-1~ppa1_all.deb (56.0 KiB)
After installing the .deb file, don't forget to restart the Gnome Panel (see step 4 above).

Download NameBar 0.5 (source code)