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."

Comments

Rox -rocks

[Lumpy]

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.

Re:Rox -rocks

[prmths]

I totally agree... I've been using rox for quit a bit of time.. and it screams on my athlon 1.5 and P3 1.13
windows, nautilus, konqueror, -- all have the same problem -- laggy and non-responsive when you have tons of files in a directory.. rox just blazes through it.. my only complaint -- when a file has an executable flag - it automatically runs it -- but i'm sure there's a option somewhere to turn that off... I just havn't looked..

sure, windows XP, nautilus, etc might be an eyeful.. but... performance is what I prefer.

They support MacOS X style app wrappers!

[jeske]

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.

Re:They support MacOS X style app wrappers!

[Ed Avis]

The app-directory idea is neat, but it has its problems. Some things do require a central registry of applications - like associating particular file types with particular apps. So what do you do - scan the whole hard disk at boot looking for app directories and registering them?

On RISC OS each app-directory had a file inside called !Boot which was run whenever the filer _saw_ the app. Normally this was (effectively) a shell script which set some system-global environment variables for associations with particular filetypes. Needless to say this action of silently running !Boot files was a great way to spread viruses. But surprisingly opening a directory full of apps was still pretty snappy.

This system extended to libraries - a library would usually be installed as an app directory and it would need to be 'seen' by the filer before anything using that library could find it. Later on even the temporary directory (called !Scrap) did this. That is cute - you can move the temporary directory from one place to another just by clicking and dragging - but it's a nuisance that these things have to be 'seen' on every startup. IIRC there was later some method to save a session file which would visit every application seen so far, and run this session file again next time.

Since ROX-filer is just a file manager and doesn't have to set system-wide things like file assocations, it doesn't suffer from these problems AFAIK. But is there any real _need_ for app-directories?

It seems to me that they were most useful when using a handful of floppies and maybe a small hard disk; when applications were small enough to fit on a single floppy and so just copying from one disk to another was enough to 'install' an app. But how do you deal with depedencies on a particular library version, for example? Using a package manager which can check these things looks like a good idea.

Maybe a fusion of app-directories and RPM/dpkg packages would be useful. How about a package which you can double-click on to run the application immediately, but also choose to install 'centrally' (perhaps by dragging it to some strange-looking icon at the bottom of the screen) to make it install as a package, with binaries in $PATH and all that stuff.

I dunno - I liked app directories on RISC OS, but I also like Unix-style package management with install and uninstall scripts and dependency checking. And I recognize that software packaging on Unix/Linux is more complex than it was on RISC OS or even on NextStep.

I wonder what OS X does in this area?

ROX on PDAs?

[DocSnyder]

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.

Re:They support MacOS^H^H^H^H^HRiscOS wrappers

[tjwhaynes]

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

Macintosh philosophy

[markj02]

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.

Nice for expatriated Mac users

[mbrubeck]

I grew up with Macintosh System 6. That was a long time ago; first I jumped ship to BeOS back in the PR1 days and became a bash and vi junkie; later moving to Debian and becoming a free software hacker. For the most part I abandoned my MacOS roots.

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:

However, recent desktop efforts (such as KDE and GNOME) seem to be following the Windows approach of trying to hide the filesystem and get users to do things via a Start-menu or similar. Modern desktop users, on Windows or Unix, often have no idea where their programs are installed, or even where their data files are saved. This leads to a feeling of not being in control, and a poor understanding of how the system works.

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.

Beats Gnome 4.0

[radulovich]

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.

Re:Beats Gnome 4.0

[tal197]

Who want's to go to submenu after submenu just to get to the delete option?

There are a few things you can do about this:

• Bind a key (eg, Ctrl-X) to Delete. Now, you can just press Ctrl-X and click on the file.
• Bring up the menu with Ctrl held down. That way, the pointer will appear right in the middle of the menu you want.
• Bind ! to open the shell minibuffer. Then you can type !rm<Return> to delete the file under the cursor.
• Use Gtk+-2.0 (compile using --with-gtk2). This supports Mac-style menus that let you move quickly from the root menu to the Delete entry in the submenu without it closing. Since the menu with Delete is already open when the main menu is displayed, you just move the mouse straight to the item.

I may make an option so that right-clicking a file goes straight to the context menu. For most users, though, it's better to show them the whole menu every time.

Brilliant system...

[Junta]

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.

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 /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/)

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 :)