ROX Desktop Update 181
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."
More Information (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Isn't this reminicent of... (Score:2, Informative)
Bye.
ROX on PDAs? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Macintosh philosophy (Score:3, Informative)
The links:
RISC OS 3.11 [209.196.53.130] The one every british schoolchild will be familiar with...
RISC OS 4 [209.196.53.130] The current version, with fancier marble look.
Re:Rox -rocks (Score:3, Informative)
LOL. But in fact ROX will never be as fast as what inspired it - the RISC OS desktop (mostly) hand-written in ARM assember. Acorn's 8MHz ARM-based desktop was in fact faster than almost anything short of a Sun workstation back in 1988 when RISC OS came out, but most of the _feeling_ of speed came from the OS being implemented in assember, and on ROM so it loaded instantly. Legend has it the windowing code was written by a games programmer - perhaps the best person to pick.
Is anyone keeping an official list of 'desktop software that looks good and isn't horribly bloated like almost everything else seems to be these days, not like back when I were a lad' (tm)? I nominate Dillo [sourceforge.net] and Icewm [icewm.org]; I would use ROX-filer if I needed a file manager (I've become accustomed to using the shell now). I can't bring myself to give up XEmacs though :-(.
Brilliant system... (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:They support MacOS X style app wrappers! (Score:4, Informative)
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?
Re:Brilliant system... (Score:2, Informative)
OS/2. No kidding, and you thought it was dead (it isn't).
Most apps are very well behaved, except for the compressed package it usually comes in, you are generally free to move stuff around as you wish.
In fact Serenity Systems (www.serenity-systems.com) has taken this and run with it. Drag 'n drop installation over the network. Deploy your apps to many workstations via a single drag 'n drop.
It can be done because nearly all the functionality is already built into OS/2's WPS.
It may sound revolutionary to some of you, but millions of OS/2 users have already seen this.
Re:What ROX Lacks (Score:2, Informative)
Per folder (as in real directories on your file system), you can define any window size, icon arrangement, background colour, font, layout (free, grid, etc), large/small icon or just text, just about anything you can imagine.
Customization of colours, fonts, background is all via simple drag 'n drop if you wish.
Great step forward for Linux, but it's just catching up to something been done waaay back in the mid-90's
nautilus vs rox (Score:2, Informative)
Five minutes research (Score:2, Informative)
It defaults to ~/Choices if you don't set it to something else.
This is in Rox's FAQ on the project homepage.
Re:Beats Gnome 4.0 (Score:4, Informative)
There are a few things you can do about this:
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.
Re:Rox -rocks (Score:3, Informative)
The Options box would be a good place to start ;-)
Try Options->Types->Ignore eXecutable bit for known extensions.
Also, for text files, click with Shift held down to load it into a text editor instead of running it (this works with other files too). Shift + right button click to get a menu of possible applications to send it to.
Enlightenment Desktop shell (Score:1, Informative)
Re:They support MacOS X style app wrappers! (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, ROX-Filer does deal with that (although a patch recently appeared on the developer list to let it use the GNOME settings instead).
As an example, let's say you want HTML documents to load into Galeon:
You can also supply a command in the dialog box instead, eg galeon "$@".