Slashdot Mirror
ROX Desktop Update
tal197 writes: "More than two years since the ROX desktop (a desktop based around the filesystem) was last
mentioned on slashdot, the second stable branch of the central
ROX-Filer
component has just been released. It's still pretty light and fast, despite all the
changes, and integrates well with other desktops too."
For more information on ROX Desktop, check out the Freshmeat details.
Sure and wouldn't it be better to settle on a single OS (i.e. Windows) and forget about giving people a choice? Choice is good, remember?
Wouldn't it be better to settle on a single desktop instead of bringing out competing desktops every month? Thank you for your input, Mr. Gates. Does anyone else have an opinion? No? Okay, we'll go ahead with that plan then....
Got Rhinos?
Not that I use any of those desktop thingys, but choice is a good thing. One of the most annoying things about the windows XPerience is that everything has to be done the way the designers thought was best.
I;ve been using windowmaker with Rox-filer in the desktop mode for quite a while now on machines Like a P-MMX 200 with only 64 meg of ram. It works great, abiword runs under it nice. and the whole thing feels faster than Xp on a 2 processor 2ghz each machine.
I placed one of these in the general sales work area and I have recieved tons of comments on how fast it is. One person asked if it was prototype hardware that you couldnt buy yet because it was so fast.
I reccomend everyone give Rox a try. it mates with several light windowmanagers and makes an awesome desktop that is easy to lock down and configure.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Wow, I just took a look and the ROX Filer is truly revolutionary. This is the first simple example of the powerful Nextstep and MacOS X concept of "app wrappers" brought to Linux.
App-wrappers are a system which solves many of the application installation problems associated with the Windows Registry and systems like RPM. By locating all of an applications files under a single relocatable directory, installing an application is as simple as dropping the "app wrapper directory" on your filesystem.
Lets all hope this concept finally takes off on Linux, so it can pave the way for simple 3rd party application distribution.
You got it all wrong.
Standardisation does not mean conformity! It's fanatics like you who are keeping the Linux on desktop down.
Settle on a standard, write all programs to conform to that. Everyone else who doesn't like the standard desktop is free to write his/her own niche version of the program. It's free source, people!
The owls are not what they seem
Heres another way to get your ROX off with Linux...
Not everyone deserves a 320i
...that scene in Jurassic where the girl is like, "this is unix, I know this..." when playing with that whizzy cool desktop. Heh they fooled us all cause we all know command line is where it is. Anyways, isn't this akin to making Windows File Manager your shell? Personally, I think it's pointless. It's like going back in time to Sun's OpenWindows with no toolbar and just a file manager to deal with on load. Ick. Stick to toolbars, not FS.
Instead of ranting, why don't you post some information links? Who or what are you talking about?
More importantly, why don't you stop ranting on Slashdot and innovate something yourself? Put your coding where your mouth is.
Got Rhinos?
For those not fluent in French: "WTF can this do?"
Got Rhinos?
There are the windows XPerience designers who want to lock everything down. Ok. That works with the closed source.
Then there are the open source guys who are afraid to/incapable of settling on a well defined, common standard that would bring unified desktop and improve user friendliness on Unix. Why? Because they are afraid of things getting locked down. But how could the desktop get locked down when everything is open source?! Settle on a standard and if anyone is not satisfied, let him/her compile her own programs and live outside the standard! Don't make us all live in the "download the most recent code and recompile it" hell. Some of us just want a desktop that works and looks good. We don't want to tweak our computers!
The owls are not what they seem
You can have 50 desktops but if you have to exit all 50 of them to go into Windows to play games or do word processing or any one of 10 other common tasks that you can't really do in Linux as well if at all, it doesn't really matter so much...
Quit complaining. Fill in the damn form with some nice bogus info... Never forget presedent@whitehouse.gov is a valid E-mail address to give to Real, or anyone who wants your E-mail address and have no valid reason for you to give it to them.
Not everyone deserves a 320i
s/filesystem/file manager/
Then it makes more sense.
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
Are you not arguing against your initial position here? Maybe the ROX people were dissatisfied with what was avalible and decided to "live outside the standard". If you don't want to tweak your computer, then use whatever desktop that came with it, you don't have to use ROX if you don't want to.
That is exactly the mentality that made MS the monopoly it is today.
People sold themselves into slavery with MS. There may have been some questionable (downright illegal) practices, but I don't think this really made a difference. Business owners and consequently office workers adopted one single interface.
Only after this mindset was established did MS have the leverage to really screw other companies out of business. CP/M wasn't a victim of anti-competitive practices. DR-DOS wasn't a victim until Win3.1.
Variety is the spice of life. Competition is a good thing, even in Open Source, where money isn't the motivator.
New ideas would never grow if there was only one desktop. No one likes branches in projects, especially just to try out usability features. The only recourse is to start a different project, or move to a different project, that thinks along the lines that you do. Once the features are tried, tested, and appreciated by one user base, then maybe the commitee that is the larger application might be convinced to try it.
If everyone decided to leave it to one filesystem, we probably wouldn't have any descent journaling filesystems, for instance. Ext2 was great, why use anything different? Why use new significantly new features in a system we already know and love?
Variety, competition, and choice are all good things, in life as well as open source.
Your missing the point. If I want to open up a PDF file, I click on the PDF link and AcroRead opens up. It's 100% free (as in beer) and there are no annoying nag screens. This REAL peice of shit asks me my details EVERY FUCKING TIME I RUN THE FUCKER
I tried it via X11 redirection on my iPAQ (running Familiar GNU/Linux). It wouldn't take much hassle to make ROX the ultimative PDA environment: ROX is lean as in resources as well as in screen space, it's very functional and flexible, and it can be used with a stylus or with a one-key mouse.
It's a low-impact desktop that runs on top of a window manager. While KDE and Gnome might be the 'nuclear-powered' GUI, they do sap a workstation's resources. (This is a common complaint about distros.)
If you've got a lower-powered workstation sitting around -- an old Pentium 133, for example -- you can put ROX on top of XFree and a window manager like Windowmaker to keep the impact light. This is also good if you're running a Linux box for a special-purpose (such as a firewall) and don't need all of the bells and whistles.
There was an on Slashdot in December on running a 'Lo-Fat' desktop that talks a lot about this.
"It remains to be seen if the human brain is powerful enough to solve the problems it has created." Dr. Richard Wallace
Is there a templates dir?
I'll find out in 10mins, apt-getting as I type.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
only if you play lame games or use lame wordprocessing.
only lusers use windows. and you sir are a LOOOOOOOSER....
Wow, I just took a look and the ROX Filer is truly revolutionary. This is the first simple example of the powerful Nextstep and MacOS X concept of "app wrappers" brought to Linux.
Funny you should call them MacOS X style app wrappers because they are based on a much older system from Acorn RiscOS :-) Hence ROX - Risc Os on X.
Other really nice things are the Drag-and-drop save - why the hell hasn't this caught on elsewhere? After all, we drag things into windows to indicate the movement of data from one window to another. We drag files into apps to load them. Why hasn't dragging a 'file' out of an app to a filer window caught on as the most obvious way to save a file?
As an avid user of Acorn RiscOS back in its hey day (when men were Real Men, women were Real Women and real furry creatures from Alpha Centuri were Real Furry Creatures from Alpha Centuri), ROX allows me to get passed all the normal windowing cruft and really allow me to use the desktop.
As someone else has already said, ROX rocks.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
In that case, I'd like all the open source guys to drop everything they're doing and provide me, the user, with the most friendly desktop possible. I'm not quite sure what that is yet, but I think it'll involve clowns and the color mauve...
And, I'm sure everyone else will love to make it the standard.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
The ROX desktop seems much closer to the Macintosh philosophy than other desktops. On the Mac, too, much of the interaction with the system is through a single paradigm built around the file system. This, to me, is a far more promising direction for a usable Linux desktop than complex megaprojects like KDE or Gnome.
Is that FT is boinking Em4 and I think Em3 is a little jealous.
I never managed to shake a nagging feeling of loss: I missed the Finder. Oh, I tried various graphical file managers -- Midnight Commander, assorted OS/2 and NeXT clones, and more recently Nautilus. None of them worked for me; I tried to use them but always found myself switching back to the shell to get anything done. Most recently, I tried MacOS X and had the same problem! My beloved Finder -- constant from System 6 all the way to MacOS 9 -- had been replaced by this strange marriage of Windows Explorer and the NeXT Workspace Manager.
What did I want that all these tools failed to deliver? A physical feeling of the filesystem. The idea that this directory is here... and this one is over there... and I can reach through the screen with my mouse, scoop up a bunch of files, and drop them in a new location. Also a sense of immediacy. The file manager must be lightweight and optimized enough that opening a new directory is, perceptually, a zero-cost operation. The interface must be sparse enough that you feel you are working in the filesystem, not through a bunch of widgets and menus. Sure, browsers like Nautilus or the OS X Finder support classic Finder-style browsing, but they don't stay out of your way enough for you to ignore the browser and focus on the files.
The introduction on the ROX pages sums up some of how I feel:
One other system managed to give me the same intuitive feel for the filesystem, and that was the Be Tracker, a blatant but well-crafted Finder clone. Despite serious flaws (no hierarchal list views!), it was so nice to use that it was my primary interface into my computer when I used BeOS. The ROX Filer looks like a promising start. I will download it and hope, and contribute where I can.
I think it'll involve clowns and the color mauve
If it meant that the clowns and the color mauve are standard across ALL the applications, I'd still use it.
The current "use whatever widget set you want" anarchy is just horrible.
The owls are not what they seem
We don't want to tweak our computers!
Holy $#!` my heart stopped!
MEDIC!!! MAN DOWN! MAN DOWN!
you blasphemous heathen!
Your page widening doesn't work on Mozilla 0.9.8, you moron.
The owls are not what they seem
I'm a scientist. I don't want to waste my precious time MAKING the computers to work the way I want. I want them to work the way I want from the box.
The owls are not what they seem
I'm not sure if there is a free version of it available, but I'm sure we could start a project to make one available under the GPL.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
I think Miguel, Redhat, Sun, et. al. should seriously consider this for future versions of Gnome. "Why," you might ask?
First, it is VERY fast. No, make that EXTREMELY FAST. For once, my PIII-866 feels like a fast machine. Running Linux or Windows, my computer feels considerably slower. Rox put a smile on my face with that.
Second, this allows people to run multiple versions of applications, just like the mono project is supposed to.
Third, it's easy to configure - is it SIMPLE, but effective. You can copy an application by copying a simple directory. It simplifies the dll hell by making applications self contained. You could even have multiple versions in one directory if you wanted to. (http://rox.sourceforge.net/appdirs.php3 shows a simple example with tgif).
Finally, it works today. Mono is still several months off at the earliest, and requires chasing MS all over the place with regard to changes.
I'd rather have a mediocre standard than good individualized apps. At least with a standard, you only have to improve it once and everyone benefits.
Right now, everything is individualized and it's closer to flaming pile of shit than good.
Since you don't like Karma, I removed some from you. Enjoy your -1 post that nobody can see.
First let me say that ROX is my favorite graphical
file manager for X. With that said, let me
tell you why I don't use it. It lacks the ability
to save view preferences on a per-directory basis.
A directory with one file opens up with the same
default view preferences as a directory with 200
files. There needs to be a way to save window
size, icon size, sort order, etc.
Actually, the real reason I don't use it, is
because a modern shell seems so much more
efficient at file operations than any
graphical file manager could be.
XJS*C4JDBQADN1.NSBN3*2IDNEN*GTUBE-STANDARD-ANTI-U
Linux should innovate like Microsoft does, right?
Oh wait, they copied their GUI from MacOS.
Since you're such a big Microsoft fan, and Microsoft doesn't innovate either, do have NO RIGHT to whine about Linux not innovating.
GUI "innovation" is not always a good thing.
New GUIs will only confuse people.
Since most people are familiar with Windows' GUI, why invent something new that will only confuse people, causing even more flamebaits and trolls?
If it ain't broken, don't fix it.
The truth is, most Joe Average users don't care about innovation.
Humor through obscurity is only slightly better than security thusly.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Wow! Your comment is really interresting. It shows your knowledge of Linux once brainwashed by a M$ sales rep!
Try it out and learn about it before bitching!!!
Its a ripoff of Acorn Computers RISC OS, (now owned by Pace, the desktop version is developed by RISC OS Ltd). The RISC OS Ltd website
However every person whoes been through the british education system in the last 10 years will be able to use it, as for a while Acorn computers were the mainstay in schools. However I found the drag icon to window to save system annoying myself.
Apparently some of RISC OS is still written in BASIC as well.
-- This is not a sig. But I'm a liar.
XFCE
Thanks AC, XFce looks pretty cool. I think I'll download this tonight and give it a test run.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Not quite the same thing, but classic Mac OS has text and picture clippings. If you just select some text in any app and drag it to the desktop it makes a text file with the first 20 or so characters of text. Works for pictures and movies too. Very nice feature. Missing in OS X :(
Tim Smith - Ramblings from Nerd Land
At my moms work a couple of years ago:
Mom: "I can't find the file that i saved."
Me: "So, where did you save it?"
Mom: "In Windose."
Me: "In what directory?"
Mom: "What do you mean. It was right here."
What I like so much about the ROX-Filer is that is acheives the useful functionality of Gnome/KDE without the cruft, so it goes unbelievably fast.
/usr/local/bin for command-line support. Removing a package is as simple as removing those three folders. Of course, the AppDirs don't run as cleanly under command lines and library tools, but there is a patch to bash to support AppDirs and ROX-Lib demonstrates well how libraries can work in this system. In the meantime scripts that wrap AppRun calls are easy enough to place in the path.. I have PythonTheater (a media player designed with ROX in mind) configured in this manner (http://xtheater.sourceforge.net/)
:)
And Python programmers should take a look at ROX-Lib. The primary bit that is really cool is the really simple API for creating, accessing and modifying xml configuration files that follow the same ~/Choices/ convention that ROX-Filer follows, which seems infinitely better than the standard of polluting your home directory with dotfiles and dotdirectories... Not only that, but also will generate a nice, usable GUI to manipulate those files without the programmer having to build it by hand (though the programmer has to provide a well hinted sample xml file, but this is *far* more trivial than writing the gui out by hand). Not only does this make things easy on the developer, but also enforces consistency among apps that choose to use it.
Also, the entire concept of AppDirs is very very nice. Installing an application simply involves dragging it wherever you want, and it doesn't scatter files all over the file system, making package management a moot point. The de-facto standard has been to scatter files all over the damn place right next to other packages and this creates a huge problem package managers have been trying to solve effectively, but it is never perfect (packages occasionally make modifications not tracked by these managers). AppDir as ROX is designed around and specifies keeps package files well separated, in its own AppDir, own subdir of a system Choices directory, or per-user Choices directories. Nothing stops a bad developer from breaking this convention, but there rarely is a need, at most placing a wrapper script in
Only issue with ROX-Lib is that it is python specific, so all that cool stuff is only for python developers, but I like python too
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
How do you deal with user settings? I mean if you store the app on a server How do you have each user have there own user settings.
Funny you should call them MacOS X style app wrappers because they are based on a much older system from Acorn RiscOS :-) Hence ROX - Risc Os on X.
Does Acorn predate classic MacOS? Because the Mac has worked this way for as long as I can remember. Long before Mac OS X.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
This is one area where the ROX Filer really scores, and why I don't like Nautilus, etc. It means you can leave several Filer windows littered around your desktop without getting in the way too much. This makes drag and drop saving an instant affair instead of that awful file chooser you have to negotiate EVERY single time you want to save a file. The other great thing is that it's so productive when you know how to use it. Eg generally right button does reverse of left button so you can scroll up and down using one scroll button without moving the mouse.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
An interesting project would be repackaging a lot of common applications as ROX AppDirs.
/etc/* (consistency would be nice), would make for a very nice, updated, modern, easier to use and configure, Unix system. Um... like MacOS... but without Aqua.
That, combined with a nice replacement for
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
This isn't exactly revolutionary, even our friend Microsoft has had this feature since at least Windows 98, and probably 95. You can select text in Wordpad, MS Word, etc. and drag it to the desktop to make a "scrap" file. I've never actually found it useful, but someone must have...
Rock over London, Rock on Chicago. Wheaties: Breakfast of Champions.
I use nautilus onmy desktop, turn off alot of the bells and whistles, smooth icons etc, and you have a realtively fast system. It does not however compare to ROX as far as speed goes. I installed the ROX and i just found it.. lacking a polished interface, it was hard to configure.. the options menu had very few thing i could fiddle around with and as soon as in inatlled, i didn't know what to do. I personally think nautilus is the best fm as far as ease of use goes, speed, i give to ROX. ... heck anything beats GMC and its clunkyness
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
I have used "someone@microsoft.com" ever since Outlook Express said "Fill in your email address, e.g. 'someone@microsoft.com'".
The address doesn't bounce- they probably filter it all out.
graspee
And now we have it. A brand new pr0n browsing desktop for Linux. Just like it always did, pr0n inspires yet another computer innovation.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
(from linked article)
"The devil told a woman that he would make her spit out a transistor radio and lo and behold she started spitting out bits and pieces of a radio transistor"
Now, if we could just make this work with computers...
Amazing how five minutes research can turn up information such as the CHOICESPATH environment variable.
It defaults to ~/Choices if you don't set it to something else.
This is in Rox's FAQ on the project homepage.
after using gmc, Nautilus and Konqueror (and TkDesk, and various others), i found ROX.
and never looked back.
For the few times i need to use a file-manager (I usually prefer the command-line), ROX works like a charm. Plus it's not bloated and slow like Konqueror and the hideously bloated and slow Nautilus.
I no longer use either GNOME or KDE because of the poor performance, which doesn't seem to be improving with newer releases, and WindowMaker + ROX run all the GTK+/Qt apps, without the baggage of some stupid Windows-alike 'Desktop Environment'
It literally starts up in under a second on my P3-500, and does everything i need from a filemanager.
I don't use the other ROX components, but the file manager is perfect for me.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Classic Mac OS has never had that feature. (Adding a special extension to turn a directory into a single icon/bundle.)
It's had resource forks, but those are an entirely different implementation of a similar concept.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Of course, dragging and dropping apps to install is all very well for the user, but surely it completely removes the opportunity to use shared libraries? The reason Linux splashes files in different directories is to make them easy to share files with each other.
Of course, I don't know this - but I'd bet anything that the reason the OS X installer for Mozilla is 15mb compared to 9/10 for Windows/Linux is because OS X doesn't have the same concept of shared libs, so much more must be shipped with the product. Interestingly, once decompressed Moz on OS X is 35mb, compared to 15 on my windows/linux box.
Just a thought.
There are two caveats: first, Carbon/Classic apps do not all implement this functionality, as it was only introduced in Mac OS 8.5; and secondly, those Carbon and Classic apps that do sometimes don't have an active proxy until you've saved once, for whatever reason. However, once the proxy is active, it works just like RISC OS did, flaws and all.
For that to have been a 1/4 intelligent troll, goatse.cx would have been up. However, due to an act of god and a tsunami, the DNS server(s) responsible for the Christmas Island domains is down.
The next phase .17 is to turn Enlightenment into a desktop shell. I am wondering if the enlightenment developers are taking a look at this appaorch...
Okay, i've always wondered -- what is up with so many programmers' color sensibilities? Mauve, orange, pink, magenta, and teal should not be used in large quantities. Particularly not _together_! Of course, little beats old DOS and UNIX colors. (Particularly the DOS tendency to have the F12-to-rotate-colors feature.)
There are so many medical billing programs out there that make my eyes hurt, I don't want to think about it.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Open Source/Linux users have every reason to exercise their free speech and articulate what what they think without incurring any obligation to do anything at all, much less write their own code. That makes about as much sense as telling me: "So, you don't like Fords, eh? So, stop whining go build your own car!"
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Whow... this one blew me right off of my chair.
I think this is the first thing I see that can beat the command line...
It is so totally unix: small apps that can do what they're good at, no useless stuff. Quick small and stable.
Really nice to see they don't seem to feel the need to write everything in C.
I Really dig this.
I'm programming Kaos, a rewritten BSD form the exokernel to the new GUI.
I use standard ways of working on things, the whole thing is able to evolve or be modified for your convienience.
Plus you can choose what theme or skin to use the system in.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
You just have to Apple-Drag now. Works with arbitrary amount of text and with images, hypterlinks, html, rtf and most anything else you can think of. Very useful indeed.
Have fun,
Justin Dubs
And all this praise from a WPS bigot (you guys are getting there!)
Congrats again. Here's to doing it the right way (not following micro$loth, KDE, Gnome crap).
ROXFilter
This is slick... Someone please make more apps for it!
Please, dear folks at /.
Right now I'm browsing at -1, because I'm convinced the current moderation system is not very good.
So I get to read "interesting" goat msgs by 3-year old metal level idiots and I got this "insightful" message which got a 1.
What is insightful here?
Does anyone use 50 desktops even if they are available?
Must everyone go to Windows to play a game? It could be difficult to me as I don't have Windows, nor hardware enough to play Windows and I just like to play Quakeworld, my wife digs Shisen-Sho in Linux and my daughter likes Potato-Man (don't know the English name).
Yet, which "common" 10 tasks this guy does in Windows? Maybe I'm losing something here.
Thank you for *any* improvement. (Well, ok, maybe this was too much, your service is not that bad, but I cannot afford to lose some comments which get 0 or even -1 sometimes).
> Variety is the spice of life.
I love this phrase and it applies to me more than to most. I'd like to have different things almost everyday, if not from hour to hour.
Yet, I must disagree with you.
When I want a desktop blue, it bothers me the same theme can't be applied to all programs.
All I can get is a KDE blue theme, different from a Gnome/GTK blue theme, different from a blue FLTK theme, different form a blue Athena theme (thru Xdefaults) and different XFCE themes.
I don't think everybody should use the same desktop, I want my desktop to be my exclusive -- but I don't want it the way 4 ou 5 developers like it.
Don't take me wrong, I find these developers great and I thank them. But I need a coherent desktop. If not for ease-of-use then for aestethics, at least.
And ordinary people, who have not so great a need for changing colors like me, would have even greater appreciation for coherence.
And, you know what, for these people Windows provides color variation and active desktop themes, which is not much but fine enough for them.
We _got_ to have this in Linux, too.
Boy, my hat's off!
You are as machiavelic as I am!
Or even more!
Like that cartoon where they move the prison over the escape tunnel exit, so that the prisoner ends up in jail again.
Very funny.
Out of the top of my mind:
- GPL OS (well, RMS had the idea, but Linux was the first nonetheless);
- wmx window manager with its TV-channel-like desktop change;
- that old wm with tabbed windows (forgot which, see xwinman.org) - like e.g. fluxbox;
- a 3d solid-rendering quake-like tetris;
- emulators, plenty of them, some exclusive to linux (e.g., executor);
- neat tricks like in certain browsers, the ability to fake being another one, filtering out ad servers or displaying gamma-corrected images;
- work by mixed international teams like no other thing ever had;
- docking apps (like those of windowmaker & afterstep) - windows has some simple, too - my favorite is the yellow duck cpu monitor;
- all the work by the rasterman;
- advanced versions of doom - better graphics, sound, multiplayer;
- interesting image processors (gimps's script-fu);
- language translations not available in other OSes;
- IP6 support;
- beowulf support (yeah, baby, by NASA);
- old hardware support;
- heck! support for defective RAM!
- 3d window manager (really 3d, not just 3d buttons);
- textmode browsers like "links";
- I could go on but I'm tired, it's late and you must search for yourself.
Next time you say anything, thing about this: what is really innovation? If Newton himself was modest to point to former great men, we also should follow his example.
Nevertheless, Linux innovation happens constantly. If you doubt, keep an eye at Freshmeat. You'll be amazed.
www.asktog.com
I think you'll find that some parts are written in assembler code - not BASIC!
RISC OS is difficult to port over to any other platform because large chunks of the code are ARM assembler - and therefore would have to be recoded in C or C++.
For a small company (RiscOS Ltd) it's an impossible task - with little of an end market to justify the expense.
This site has some more information about Acorn/RISC OS based machines in general, but also has a few screenshots of how RISC OS looks, right at the bottom of the page. RISC OS is alive and well, and can be found here.
This rox looks nice, i'm gona try it with my E desktop.
ever since efm vapourised, E been missing a good fm.
I been using konqueror (not kicker urrh), but if this run with e and not mess up my perdy desktop too much
if rox works with sawfish, it'l work with E?
The original GEM was like that, 20 years ago or so! Check out the atari desktop, where you can reach the filesystem with 2 simple clicks!!!! The whole GEM runs fine in 128 KB, and it is fully graphical, allowing file drag-n-drop etc.
.info file, which was a simple text file describing the properties of the file. Another tool was responsible for opening and processing the .info files in a graphical manner, making the whole thing too easy. Check out this and various other bits for how the Amiga GUI was one of the best, enhancing productivity, unlike modern O/Ss.
And the Amiga OS was like that from the beginning. Each executable was accompanied with a
You can use the Archive program in KDE by creating a "Link To Application" and have it point to the AppRun script from Archive. I love that program. Just drag & drop a directory on it, and you've got an archive.
Marko No. 5
Is ROX meant to be the spitting image of the
QNX GUI?
One of the icons on the bottom of the screenshot looks supiciously like !Edit, as well...
All they need now is a 'Filecore in use' error every now and then.
I didn't completely understand the feature before. Classic Mac OS had the feature that applications were relocatable, and that's what I meant. The Microsoft Office 98 install consists of just copying the directory from CD to your hard drive.
Resource forks are another thing.
Note that Linux supports a feature that is non-standard to UNIX that makes it possible to make relocatable application directories like this: a process can determine the full path to the file that contains the executable image it is running. In general, this isn't possible under all UNIXes, and thus not completely portable. I'm very curious as to how these bundles work on non-Linux systems.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Let's knock that one on the head straight away. None of Risc OS has ever been written in BASIC. Some Risc OS applications are written in BASIC but not the operating system.
(\/)atthew
THIs thINg ROX!!
Whenever I install Real Audio, and they ask me to register, I give root@127.0.0.1 as my e-mail address. I haven't used Real Player in ages, so I don't know whether that trick still works...
Steve