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Try Gentoo. It's a clone of Directory Opus for *nix using GTK2. Very nice tool, extremely configurable.

gentoo filemanager?

I was thinking more on a kind of white pages ordered by name, so for example, if i want to contact my uncle Gen Too but I don't remmeber his address, I'll go to gentoo.tel, and I will find there contact information from all people and companies around the world who have decided they want to appear in that index and are named Gen Too (or Gentoo, for instance).

This way I will find in gentoo.tel a link to the homepage for the gentoo linux distribution but also another one for the file manager called gentoo.

So when I decide to create my company Ge nToo, S. L. in Spain, I will submit my information to the authority who controls .tel domains, so when my clients want to contact me, they don't have to think if my domain is gentoo.org, gentoo.com or whatever, they will just type gentoo.tel, and search in the descriptions of all gentoo named persons and companies, till they find mine.

There would be no more conflicts about who should own which domain, because all of them will be as easy to reach as any other - just type gentoo.tel and decide which gentoo are you interested in, the linux distribution, the file manager, my beer company called Ge nToo or my uncle Gen Too.

I really don't know if this would work, but is the only utility I can find to a the .tel TLD.

And if you're a bit masochistic, and have a GBA and a flash cart, you can get frotz for your Gameboy Advance. And yes, it is useable (if a bit tedious)... I finished Shade on this (which, BTW, is an awesome little game). Much fun. :)

You can actually use the GBA for a lot more than just UNIX -- one can import flash RAM packs and then put whatever they want on it. Check out some options.

You can even put different emulators and ROMs all on the same cartridge and then use a shell to organize and manage everything. I have an NES, SMS adn PC Engine Emulator with some of my favorite games from each system as well as 4 full GBA ROM images.

You can also check out one of my GUI interfaces to use with the shell.

I think we're a pretty underground group here (GBA flash RAM users), but who knows -- mabye I just used /. to expose the world to the many functions of the GBA(?)!

Flash carts are great, I own a 256Mbit one myself. If you do plan on buying one, I would recommend Jandaman's. That's where I bought mine. And I would suggest getting a 256 or bigger, some games wont fit on a 128Mbit card.

After you have your cart, check out these two projects. An NES emulator on the GBA, and an SNES emulator on the GBA.

Also PogoShell is great, it let's you store text and pictures that can be viewed on your GBA, as well as organize your ROMs and game saves.

From the bottom of the (file manager) project's home page:

Gentoo the Linux distribution has nothing to do with gentoo the file manager, except the latter runs on the former. I actually used the name first of the two, way back in September 1998. I've been in touch with the Gentoo folks, and we're cool.

It heavily depends on what you can do with it besides playing games. Ever tried to write a letter with a PS2? Or run a database?

Actually, I would argue this. In fact, I'd argue that getting a console makes more sense for most people:

• Buy a PS2 for $179
• Buy a lower-end PC for $500

  vs

• Buy a higher-end gaming PC for $3000

Which makes more sense? The only time this is not the case is if you're a developer or something who actually needs a lot of power out of a box, not just surfing, writing letters, and maybe hosting your site.

Besides, you could run OpenOffice.org or something on the PS2, although granted it's unlikely. Poeople seem to have something against using a box that looks like it's for games to do "serious work".

No, modding the XBOX to run Linux does not count.

And just why is that?

Truth is, it is silly to buy a PC just to play games. But the PC will still be with you a few years from now. And it might even be useful. And you can do more with it than with a console.

The average lifespan of a console (5-6 years) is much longer than the average lifespan of your average PC (2-3 years). If you're gaming on your PC, make that 6 months to one year. Those $500 graphics card upgrades will buy you 10 newly-released console games.

[snipped same-for-PDAs, PocketPC costs 3x more]

And those devices can also play games.

And mostly crappy ones, at that. The point of a game console is the games. It's not "oh, it can play games, technically, if someone wrote them" or "it's got faster, shinier graphics", it's "it's got better games".

But can the GBA store your appointments?

Yes it does. You'd be suprised what you can do with the GBA. Just go search google for the various PogoShell plugins that have been written.

Macs are worse than I thought. 2 days to compile a meg of source?

if you'd like to see how sensible people handle this sort of thing, check out the two gentoo's:

http://www.obsession.se/gentoo/

http://www.gentoo.org/

looks like so many problems would be solved if people just had some better manners.

There are two issues at hand here: legality and politeness. It is certainly legal for mozilla.org to choose and use the name Firebird for their browser -- it is indeed difficult to confuse a browser for a SQL server. It was also, however, impolite of them to do so without even taking the time to send an email to the FirbirdSQL people saying "Hey, we'd like to call our browser Firebird. You cool with that?" After all, it's not as if there's no similarity between the projects. They do different things, sure, but they're both open source, they're both computer programs, and sometimes you use a browser to access a SQL database. Fairly often, in fact.

And don't tell me that the name-choosers were unaware of the SQL project. It took them, what, four months to pick this name? Or was it five? Five and a half? And in all that time, these inveterate computer geeks never even typed the word into Google? (As of this writing, the FirebirdSQL project still tops the list of results for that search.)

It's not as though there's no precedent for two OSS projects to share a name. Look at Gentoo the Linux distro and Gentoo the file manager. At the very bottom of that second link you'll find a little note from the developer of the file manager saying "Gentoo the Linux distribution has nothing to do with gentoo the file manager, except the latter runs on the former. I actually used the name first, way back in September 1998. I've been in touch with the Gentoo folks, and we're cool."

So, ultimately, the parent post is only partially right: the legality of this move is a non-story. The story lies in the fact that the name change was made in an impolite way, apparently without any attempt to contact the FirebirdSQL group at all. Would it really have been so hard to have sent that email? They could even have exchanged reciprocal links, so that anybody who did get confused would easily be set straight. In the initial announcement of the name on the MozillaZine forums, Asa Dotzler (sp?) wrapped up with the words "Hopefully this will be the end of naming legal issues for a while." Well, he got his wish -- about the legal part, anyway.

GBA Frotz, seems to have a rather nice keyboard emulation too.

What I'd like... is a z-code VM

You mean like Frotz for GBA?

Heh, I use Gentoo.

No, not the linux distribution (well, I *do* use Gentoo as my linux distro, but that's beside the point) -- gentoo the filemanager.

It's a fairly minimal and useful FM once you get it configured for your liking. Definitely better than Konq, IMO.

There isn't a *nix made but there is a windows/mac/PARC knock off shell ;).

And honestly, NIX is overkill. Multiuser multitasking?

You mean pogoshell?

It's not exactly fully-featured PDA software due to technical limitations of the GBA. It can't write to to the flash-memory cartridge you put it on; it can only read from flash while saving soley to battery-backed sram (I have heard that it's possible for running software to write to flash. I expect it's a battery-killer, though). Navigation is done with the GBA's buttons since there is no touchscreen. Text entry requires using complex combinations of those few buttons.

It does look and behave a lot like a PDA, though.

Download GBA Frotz and install it on a flash cart and you can play text adventures on the GBA. The interface isn't great, but it's usable. You can download many free games in the z-machine format at The Interactive Fiction Archive, and almost all the Infocom text adventures will work.

• The hardware supports carts up to 256 megabit (32mb) in size. There are flash carts which have more space, however, through software bank switching. No commercial ROM currently even hits the hardware size limit (manufactureing costs, it is widely believed, are to blame; it may be the case that Big N limits the available size of carts to both themselves and third parties)
  
• Yes, a linux distro would fit. No, it wouldn't be any fun without a keyboard. Yes, TCP/IP has already been done (a working webserver, which IIRC was even on SlashDot already. That's what caused me to try to post the homebrew dev scene the first time.)
  
• Emulators: there are about a dozen good ones around; many stick to VisualBoy Advance and Mappy Virtual Machine for development. VBA is often regarded as the best and fastest emulation, and Mappy is usually seen as having the best debugging tools (source-level breakpoints, register viewing, disassembly, viewers for most of the important chunks of RAM, etc). VBA interfaces with GNU debuggers, but I'm lazy, and haven't tried it.
  
• How good is the processor? Good enough to emulate an NES? Yes. In fact, there's a port of an emulator which runs NES binaries which were stapled onto the end of the emu binary out there already (it uses scaling and rotation to fit the otherwise too-large pictures; some detail is lost, so text often looks funny, etc). I have no linkage; sorry.
  
• To be specific, the processor is an ARM7 TDMI running at approx 16 mhz. Also, the screen does 60hz refreshes, is 240x160, and has a bitmapped 15bpp color mode (among other modes, including z-buffered modes). The programmer is afforded extreme memory mapping flexability by the hardware; it's more fun than a Rubix' Cube.
  
• Sorry - should have clarified - the ones I listed are all emulators for the GBA. Sorry, but not even remotely close. You didn't even get the popular ones. There's a pretty decent list here, at Zophar's Domain (a pretty good dev site)
  
• Descent is probably beyond the GBA's capabilities, since it uses arbitrarily-angled perspective-correct textured polygons, which are a fair bit harder to render on a low-end CPU (the GBA has a 16MHz ARM7 CPU).You should see some of the stuff that's going on. There are a number of fully textured 3D engines out there, one of which actually uses Descent levels as its examples! (I linked to another in my previous post which uses the quake level 1) A good example is the Raylight engine, though there are probably a dozen that I've seen (and a few proprietary, one of which I'm about halfway done writing :) )
  
• Hey, maybe we'll see Tux Racer for the GBA? That'd be tight. Quite possible. A racer wouldn't be difficult - the floor is a mode 7 S/R background, the sprites are prerendered, and there's enough VRAM that they don't need to be DMAed into place or anything (though people do that anyway, often enough [grins])
  
  Actually, how low-level is the API? Any chance someone could get Linux running on one of these babies?"The API" isn't. HAM has an engine, SGADE has an engine, there are others (I don't use them), and there are some commercial ones. But, here's the thing: the hardware does a lot of stuff. Sprites and backgrounds are supported in hardware, and do scaling and blending stuff, etc. It's just register tweakage. You don't really need an API.
  
  Big N does send an API of some sort, but I'm not a licensed developer, so I know dick about it. I'm told it's not that much of a difference - mostly just wrapper functions.
• well if you realyl want to consider assembler an API, that is your answer. ARM flavored assmebler. We're not stuck to Assembly. Though there are about six assemblers in common use (the one that gets most use as not just part of a toolchain seems to be GoldRoad, but because I don't use assembly except in-line, I have a biased perspective), there are also a buttload of C and C++ and so forth compilers. Because Gnu's Compiler Collection (GCC does not mean gnu's c compiler) works and is the common compiler for the homebrew platform, you also have access to *compiled* java, pascal, and I think Objective C and Forth, or Fortran, or something that starts with an F. Too lazy to go check. :)
  
  There are other compilers which can target the platform. Commercial people often use the ARM ADS or SDT. Other tools, like the Metaware toolchain and the Green Hills Optimizing Compiler (it's part of the name, not a parroted description, settle down) are commonly used because of their purported performance. Far from being an expert myself, I'll just point you at the Dhrystone that David Welch graciously presented to the community.
  
• I was planning on trying to develop something on my friends PS2 when he got the Linux kit. But since I actually own a GBA, this is a much more worthy project. More worthy, but more difficult. You'll want a flash cart and linker - the hardware is still the only perfect binary executor, though VBA is pretty impressive. All told, the PS2 Linux kit isn't more expensive, and it's hella more fun in the long run (Tux Racer on a console anyway, doncha know!)
  
• At about $70 (Game Boy Advanced, Amazon price [amazon.com]), you can create custom games, ports of other things, etc. This sounds to me like a much more practical thing to purchase to play around with the the PS2, which is in at least the $500 range to start hacking your own stuff for. You're counting just the hardware in one, but the hardware and the mod stuff in the other. $200 (ps2) + $200 (Linux kit) is $400. There was a recent price drop. $70 (AGB) + $40 (USB Flasher) + $15 (Power cable for flasher) + $10 (Parallel cord) + ~$100 (Average flash cart - price varies by size) = $235. Granted, a $175 price difference, but not what you implied. Also, a lot of us already have both. Then, the price of a homebrew kit actually weighs in the other direction, and the AGB is small and limiting enough that unless you really want to, it's a pain of a challenge.
  
• It would be interesting to know how many people will create practical, non-game applications. I know there are many non-game attachments, like a TV tuner and digital camera available for the unit. There are already music sequencers, methods of connecting it (realtime!) to a PC for chatter, MIDI sequencers, connections to serve as visualizers for various kinds of data collectors (think forest service), and a host of weird homebrew things that aren't exactly games. I expect quite a few more over time; I'm working on one in a half-assed way right now. Moreover, over time I expect level editors for at least homebrew games, and possibly for commercial games; would you call those applications?
  
• This would totally rule.. I'd love to see Nethack for the GB. I'm currently working on a Palm version, and of course, it'll work on Windows CE, but honestly, wouldn't Nethack be an awesome alternative to bejeweled on the bus?Shhh... Shen Mansell already has Moshpit put together, and there are three or four people already rumbling about alternatives on the list. Also, note that I'm on alt.games.roguelike.development making an ass of myself all the time... (For those who may be Ccurious, a BooFly is a creature which looks like Will Riker and which doesn't meet me for coffee at E3. Thpppbbt.)
  
• I think that companies like Nintendo and Sony and such should sell stipped down dev kits for like, say $50... including software you'd need and maybe a transfer cable. This gets kicked around a lot in the chatrooms and on the dev lists. The consensus seems to be that yeah, it'd be nice, but though a lot of people would really use it for what it was for, a whole lot of people would use it to pirate games, and besides, Big N's licensing fees per cart and hegemony on software support their business model, so they'd be hurting themselves anyway. In conclusion: not bloody likely.
  
• No disrespect to the great underground game hackers out there, but I don't think there is much of a risk of an uber fantastic game like Gran Tourismo 3 getting put out. Whereas art and sound resources usually make this true, with time, they actually often do. Take a look into the very mature NES or 2600 development scenes; you'll see things you'd never imagine possible (for instance, someone ported the Z-Machine interpreter Frotz to the GameBoy Advance as GBA Frotz, which seems impressive until you realize that the no$gmb guy, who I think is Martin Korth or something, and who really needs to put his damn name in his bio page, did it for the gameboy(!) in *8* *K* of RAM (far smaller than the real Z-Machine was supposed to be), and it works fine! Linkage
  
  Homebrew developers thrive on being told it can't be done. The more you tell them they can't do commercial stuff, the more you're going to see commercial stuff done. That's what got me started. :)
  
• Yes, Craig Rothwell is reliable (someone else's post). Also, though Lik-Sang is reliable (that's where I got mine), right now cyustoms is banning the import of these, and so you won't get one even if lik-sang mails it to you. Craig Rothwell currently goes under their radar, but don't try him if you're seeing this post a month or so old - things may have changed (they often do, unfortunately). The best thing to do is to go to the Yahoo! Group and ask; you'll get a lot of replies in 48 hours.
  
• I know that the Game Cube can use GBA as controllers. I am not sure what the interface protocol is like, though. Do you think that it might be possible to make custom GBA carts for Cube games, that provide enhancements (cheats, etc) to a game playing on the Cube? No. The GC uses half-size DVD discs which are difficult to burn and which have not yet had their protections cracked or circumvented. Things may change later.
  
• So does this mean that with the ROMS that are for the SNES, we could somehow make our own port of say "Secret of Mana" (or some other SNES title) for the GBA? That would be awesome! Though probably not awesome enough for me to spare time to learn this. If you're dedicated. you need to scale a lot of graphics down; the sound hardware is completely different, so the audio stuff will need to be wholly rewritten. There are odd considerations due to the different CPUs. But, yeah, many people have been porting SNES and Genesis games commercially; I don't see why a team of amateurs with lots of time and skill couldn't do the same. It's not easy, though, mind you.
  
  This is our world now...the world of the electron and the switch, the beauty of the baud. Pre-chewed pieces of pap! And shouldn't be teaching anyway!!@!3T1!! r00l!
  
  cough Sorry. Old habits die hard.
  

Such as an Infocom adventure player, an ebook reader and Wonkie Guy, a platform game.

Likely Nintendo wants a few $$ for everything developed on the GBA, and a few $$ for every game sold/distributed/given away, so they'll no doubt be pretty pissed about all these hacks.

Yeah. As the author of the gentoo filemanager, I really wish the headline here would have included the phrase "Gentoo Linux", to make it clear. Not that the risk for confusion outside my own head is, er, overwhelmingly large, or anything. Incidentally, I just released 0.11.23 of gentoo-the-filemanager-for-GTK+ yesterday, if someone would like to try it out...

As the developer and maintainer of a little GTK+-based application (plug, plug),

I was a user of your Gentoo file manager and can highly recommend it (since I am an old Amiga user :-), but I stopped caring to download it all the time. Is there any hope of getting it into Linux distributions?

Also high on my list of applications that ought to be in distributions, but are not, is the visual system monitor qps.

Do distributors have a "suggestion form" that one can fill out to request an application included in new versions?

As the developer and maintainer of a little GTK+-based application (plug, plug), I see this is very good news, of course. But whoa, it's going to be a lot of work porting over... Using the deprecated widgets is an impossibility for any self-respecting maintainer, imo. ;^) Also, I sure do hope they managed to get the speed up a bit from the 1.3.x series... That was really underwhelming. Which was sad, since 1.2.x is very snappy.

Well, for my own little pet project, a full rebuild takes ~5 minutes. On my nearly vintage K6-233, that is. One main reason I'm looking forward so much to a new computer system (besides the gaming, that is) is the chance to shrink that time by a significant amount. If I was a kernel developer, the ability to do a full rebuild in 23 seconds wouldn't hurt a bit, I'm fairly sure.

If you want more responsiveness, fix your toolkits. This is happening in GTK+ v2.
It is? Great. I've been developing a GTK+ app for three and a half years, using GTK+ 1.0 and lately 1.2. Since I'm looking forward to GTK+ 2.0, I recently downloaded a snapshot of the development series (1.3.10) and built it, to try it out. Geeez, was it slow! Now, I don't have any numbers or anything, but based on my experience, the simple list test program I wrote feels 3-5x less responsive than it would be under GTK+ 1.2. Clicking a list item has a noticeable delay before it gets rendered in the selected state. Now, my machine (a K6-233/128) is obviously not a modern day monster, but still. If there are initiatives to make GTK+ 2.0 faster than its predecessors, they sure seem to start by going quite a bit in the opposite direction.

[...]for a file manager you need something fast, not pretty. If it can be both then fine, but right now it's just eye candy. I prefer a GUI for managing my files but so far I have not seen anything that is as nice as Windows Explorer (95 version or 98 with all the shit turned off).
OK, ObPlug: Tried gentoo yet? It's far from an Explorer work-alike, but more than one person have called it "fast". Of course, I'm highly biased, so... ;^) Anyway, here's a link: gentoo-0.11.17.tar.gz (717 KB, tar.gz source archive). Enjoy.

Heh. Since you asked for it, I guess a little bit of plugging is alright: check out gentoo (quick screenshot link). Some people like it.

Heh. Since you asked for it, I guess a little bit of plugging is alright: check out gentoo (quick screenshot link). Some people like it.

Nautilus is no easier to use than most of the other "big" file managers for X desktops (konqueror, gmc, the old kde file manager, gentoo, etc). As far as I can tell the only real advancement over them is the extensive (yet useless!) previewing capabilities and the MacOS Xesque look. But it is in not an improvement over the old GNOME file manager. The stability is terrible and the "features" are useless for real world work. It chokes on large directories and randomly crashes on small ones. The interface is showy at the expense of both speed and desktop real-estate. Fullscreen icons are great to look at and seem cool for the first 15 minutes, but after that they just get in the way. I don't think you're full of shit, I have no doubts that in 6 months the stability will be there, but that doesn't change the fundamental problem of giving up efficency (both speed and screen-space) for WORK for a few showy features. Nautilus, much like the company who made it, can get your attention but can't deliver what it should have been focusing on.

Wow, that author was kind of angry, wasn't he? Still, without doing any research of my own, and not exactly following the works of either Ximian, Eazel (*cough* I kinda have a different favorite fm, *cough*) or KDE, some serious-sounding issued were raised here... Do developers from competing companies actually fight over important subsystems in the GNOME code base? Scary.

One thing that made it difficult to take seriously though was the (to my eyes) invented "paradox" that the FSF should somehow be aligned with the "information wants to be free" meme. [Ouch, trend alert, I said "meme".] Anyway, in my eyes, the FSF in general, and RMS in particular, are for free software. Not information... I believe there's still a point in making a difference between the two, at least in discussions such as this. I must admit, though, that it's kind of interesting to hear that their financial records are being kept so secret... Suspicious? I don't know.

Unfourtionaly it is not that linux is a bad OS its more of a openGL problem. OpenGL is simply not developing as fast as Direct 3D. It doesnt matter how good the people behind OpenGL are if no new versions are released, it will die.

Open GL is currently having a Extension explosion where a lot of new extensions compleatly changes the way open GL is used. This makes it very dificult to use.

What is even more alarming is that there are people out ther working on new API designs like SMASH for OpenGL but they are ignored by the Open GL ARB. Soon we will need a alternative open API

Lots of people want to create virtual worlds, but currently it is way too dificult.

I come from a computer game development background and the problem facing the industry is that every one is inventing the wheel over and over again. Almost all game companies devote large resources to technology development and it costs a lot. In almost every other medium (tv, radio, film, press and so on) the tout that the providers of the content would provide the technology is absurd, but not in games.

So why is it like this? well first technology is moving fast, but that is not the main problem. The most important thing for a game developer is control: if I wrote it I can fix it. Currently a lot of new technologies are becoming so advanced (AI, graphics, physics)that very few developers can keep up, so games become very tech driven.

In order to progress we need a standard, for 3D real-time content. The infra structure is missing from the medium. Take a look at what director did to CD-ROM production, or http/html for the net. VRML is dead and it is one of the few technologies that you can openly hate, whit out offending anyone, what we need is a open system. we need some thing that every one can agree to, and we need it before microsoft realizes the potential of the medium.

Eskil Steenberg part of the verse development team. (hopefully bringing answers)

But if you liked DOpus you really must check out gentoo. An excellent filemanager made by a true old Amiga hacker (Emil Brink - who unfortunately is a little too humble to really promote his great work).

I miss my Amiga and I just find it so hard to understand why so few of the many, many truly great innovations and elegant solutions on that platform still really haven't caught on. I want a RamDisk and an ENV:! I want straight-forward no-fuss super-efficient pixel-editors for low-color-(web!)graphics (DPaint 4! Brilliance 2!!!). I want free program downloads of a few hundred K with 25 languages included. I want Datatypes. I want to script my applications from any other application! I want a GOOD LOOKING, well designed free GUI-toolkit (MUI 3.8). I want plug and play that works. I want SEPARATE chips to handle all computer IO. I want super-fast application-switching. I want sensible file dialogs (ASL) that list files so that they are easy to scan through - in ONE column - in a RESIZEABLE window adjusted to screen height! I want assigns. I want hardcore hand-optimized assembler demos with breathtaking effects on an 7MHz 68K.

Arrrghhh... I want my Amiga... ;(

ObAuthorRant: whoo-hoo, the third person who mentions my app! ;^) A handy link is right here. Thanks!

Yay, the second time someone mentions gentoo! ;^) As the author of that program, I feel compelled to not only reply, but also provide a handy link to the gentoo web page. Enjoy!

Um, you might want to try my app (mentioned above), gentoo. It's not DOpus or even a clone, but it might be similar enough for you to use while waiting for someone to port the real thing. ;^)
</PLUG>

Eh-hum, you might want to click my link (above), or here. Maybe you'll like it... ;^)