The spirit of the RISC OS desktop can now be easily be installed on Debian GNU/Linux systems, after the ROX desktop collection was released in a Debian package. The package came about after Dennis Tomas decided pull the suite into one place for users to download and install. The ROX desktop takes familiar user interface components from the RISC OS desktop, such as drag’n’drop and the filer, to create a more friendlier desktop for users of Unix-like operating systems. User Dan Macdonald told us: “It is now incredibly easy for people to install a full ROX (RISC OS on X) desktop, complete with auto-mounting of removeable discs, under Debian Linux.”
I’m particularly interested in wether it’s snappy and mature.
Edited 2006-05-29 18:36
“I’m particularly interested in wether it’s snappy and mature.”
ROX the file manager is both.
the rox desktop… eh
ROX-Session doesn’t work for me at all, which means i can’t tweak certain things (dbus issues) might be dbus might be rox session.
OroboROX is fairly decent some graphical glitches when switching themes and it lacks an intelligent window placement option (the available are: at pointer, at center), as well as things like keep on top/bottom, it does have windowsnapping to screen borders and other screen, shading can be done with the scroll wheel xfwm4 style.
the ROX-desktop (pinboard panel background workspaces) work well enough though it doesn’t execute .desktop files (though desktop2app will convert it easy) so you have to use appdirs for exectuables on the pinboard panel. it scrolls workspaces with the mouse wheel and you can drag windows from one worspace to another.
some of the applets for the panel are kinda old and don’t want to compile for me, some are fine. ditto with the other apps though.
the appdirs themselves however do work pretty well, just drag wherever and click. there isn’t a huge selection but as a proof of concept it definitely works.
the things that work all tend to be quite fast.
it should be noted i’m not talking about the rox-desktop package from the article just my own rox-desktop built ontop of Archlinux
Edited 2006-05-30 19:56
ROX-Session doesn’t work for me at all, which means i can’t tweak certain things (dbus issues) might be dbus might be rox session.
Due to the continuing API stability problems in D-BUS, ROX-Session dropped it as the primary communications mechanism in favour of XML-RPC in version 0.28. If D-BUS is available it is still used, as some applets require it.
some of the applets for the panel are kinda old and don’t want to compile for me
Binaries are provided in some cases, along with the older versions of the libraries they require. These parallel install alongside the newer library versions using Zero Install.
the ROX-desktop (pinboard panel background workspaces) work well enough though it doesn’t execute .desktop files
ROX-Filer has supported .desktop files since version 2.4, though they couldn’t be set as run actions until version 2.4.1.
Thunar is pretty good too.
Atually, Thumnar gives more options, For instance, if I want to play a .wmv file, when I click on it, it shows all the apps available to run this file. You can not do that with Rox.
-2501
Edited 2006-05-29 20:46
Thunar is a file manager, ROX is a whole desktop (not just a file manager as is commonly thought). Although i do agree, i think Thunar is the best file manager right now.
In ROX-Filer, right-click on the file for a menu of programs to open it. If you don’t see the one you want, click on “Customise Menu” and add it.
Edited 2006-05-29 21:22
While I generally use XFCE rather than the ROX desktop, I really appreciate the simplicity and speed of the ROX filer. It’s a mature and usable product, with all the features I need without the bloat of some other file managers.
I might give the full ROX desktop another try. It’s look and feel is very familiar to me, I used RISC OS for years and it has one of my all time favourite GUIs. Although obviously you don’t get the full RISC OS experience when the apps you’re running aren’t designed for the environment.
To install this you will need to be using Debian Testing. It needs Ivman which is not in stable yet.
I told Drobe.co.uk about this a few days ago and automounting of disks was working fine in the version that was available then but it got broke again (at least for me) with todays new version 1.6. On my system (Kanotix/ Debian unstable) usb disks currently get mounted fine under ROX but then you are unable to unmount them without being root. This affects KDE and GNOME too so you will have to disable the ivman daemon with unfreeze-rc.d
; rcconf (then uncheck ivman daemon); freeze-rc.d as root to get things back to normal if this happens to you.
The Good news is that ROX4Debian is coming together quickly, its components are already mature, it uses less than half the RAM and a fraction of the diskspace that KDE and GNOME use, it boots faster and is generally much more responsive. Basically, it’s the X desktop I’ve wanted for the last decade, or at least it will be very shortly! The patch so that the ROX desktop panel shows different icons for different removeable media was submitted earlier today so it should make the next release with any luck.
Join the mailing list and help us test it
http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/rox4debian-users
Dan MacDonald
You are confusing ROX-Filer with the ROX desktop.
is it possible to have this on OS X?
(yeap.. I do HATE the Finder…)