cairo-dock and autostar on raspberry pi can be pretty handy. Cairo-dock is a nice, good looking dock and autostar opens programs or apps on boot. To install cairo dock, just open the terminal and type this.

sudo apt install cairo-dock

Once it finishes, open the applications menu and you will see a new menu item if it wasn’t there before called system tools. you will notice, that there are two of them. Cairo-dock and cairo-dock fallout mode. Pick the first one. Open it and open cairo dock. Once it it opens it should look like this.

As you can see, a bunch of your applications are on the new dock that is on the bottom corner of your screen. To remove items, right click, select options, then remove from dock. To add items, open the applications, right click, then add to dock. Just like any other dock, you can sort and arrange the items however you wish, so experiment around. Cairo-dock also adds a bunch of new apps, like files, gnote and a media player. You can always uninstall these to save space.

As of when you install it, cairo dock has no way to self open when you turn on your pi. There are a bunch of apps though that can help us fix this. Just look in pi-apps and find an app called Autostar. Once installed, you can find it in the preferences area of the applications menu. Cairo-dock will also display a message asking if you want to launch the new app.

Once you open it, it will look like this.

To add a new item, just click add +new button on the bottom. Now i will ask you a couple of different questions.

The first thing that your going to want to do, it change the first one to cairo-dock.desktop.

Change the next two to cairo-dock. Once you finish it should look like this.

Then click okay. If something is wrong, it will tell you what. If not, it will take you to the first page and you will see a new item on the list.

That’s all on cairo-dock and autostar on raspberry pi! Hope that this helped you out on your raspberry pi journey! Good luck!