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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.
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?
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.
Heres another way to get your ROX off with Linux...
Not everyone deserves a 320i
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?
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
Why don't you try ROX out first? It has toolbar functionality. In fact, it's the kind of lean and mean program that has been sorely missed in computing for years.
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.
Bye.
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.
That was an SGI system running the 3d file manager which they borrowed from SGI.
You can download the source code for it and compile the program yourself. FSV. File System Viewer A Remake of FSN. The original from jurassic park
I'm a big retard who forgot to log out of Slashdot on Mike's computer! LOOK AT ME.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
I don't understand why people think shared libraries couldn't work under such a system. Though it is a collection of Python modules rather than libraries, ROX-Lib provides a proof of concept for libraries as AppDirs. Of course you could get similar behvor by having /usr/local/Lib (for example) as a library appdir, with each library having it's own subdirectory, having a name like mylib.so in each, with whatever else the library needs in the same directory. The linker could probably be patched to understand this jsut a tad slower than current...
Additionally, who says you can't mix and match? Dynamic libraries as files in a directory and applications as folders? Kinda like windows does (except have a command interpreter that would parse those AppDir in the path and execute automatically AppRun programs in them to avoid large PATH variables)
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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).
The thing that is missing, and I'm sure will be fixed in later releases, is that if a file, say on your pinboard, moves, the pinboard doesn't know about it (other than it is now missing). Then again this trivial thing with WPS, PM, and SOM isn't quite as easily accomplished in the environment ROX runs in.
ROXFilter
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.