[Scottish] Rox rocks

[Gavin McCord]

For those with less powerful PCs, I've been an advocate of XFCE, the
low-cholesterol desktop. Now, I've found a very useful add-on which may
lead me to ditch GNOME and KDE (well, as far as session management
goes).

Rox is a project inspired by Risc OS apps and can provide a file manager
for use with your current window/desktop manager, or organize your
desktop itself with support for panels and pinboards (icons on the root
window) and session management, depending on how much you install.

I'd installed XFCE again with Slackware 8.1 as I'd been impressed with
it in the past. Its file manager XFTree didn't provide icon view
support, but installing ROX would provide this functionality. However,
at the time, I hadn't bothered. An article today in Linuxworld referred
to Rox, and it looked quite neat, so I downloaded the two requisite
packages for the file manager part and compiled. (There's binary
packages for some distros.)

Running it can be as simple as typing "rox" which will bring up a window
with your home directory. "rox -p=PINBOARD" will start it up with icons
on the root window providing a modern type desktop, where PINBOARD is
the desktop name. To terminate rox, "rox -p="

It has the usual features: drag and drop, specify run actions for mime
types, provide thumbnails for images, and some nifty stuff missing from
other managers.

IIRC, KDE 1 had an option where icons could snap to a grid. But I
haven't seen it since. Rox has this, allowing you to have tidily lined
up icons. It also will allow you to have files sorted case sensitive or
insensitive and directories before files. I've been unable to get a
satisfactory layout in recent KDE or GNOME file managers. Maybe it's
possible, but I haven't been able to do it. Rox, on the other hand,
makes this easy.

It's fast as well. I just find Nautilus annoying these days; it's too
slow on my K6-2 500 machine, and KFM isn't much better. 

For those for whom looks are important - it's not bad. I tried DFM, but
that was pretty ugly and hasn't been updated for a while.

The downside - I don't know how buggy or unstable it is, but it seems
fine so far.

If you want to try it, the main site is rox.sourceforge.net

--
gav