The spirit of the RISC OS desktop can now be easily 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.
"Finally we all now have a quick and responsive, fully-featured, lightweight, open source desktop that is also easy to use and has good documentation. What more could you ask?"
To install the unofficial package, users must add the line:
deb ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/rox4debian binary/to their
/etc/apt/sources.list file, and then run:apt-get update
apt-get install rox-desktopAfter the installation, punters should log out of the X desktop and then select ROX in the X log-in window. It's recommended that GDM or xdm is used for this.
Dan commented: "I was so impressed that I dumped KDE and GNOME and now I now run Debian/ROX as my primary desktop environment. I installed a 'KanotixROXbox' for a friend recently- their computer only has about 96MB RAM and Debian/ROX runs like a dream on it.
"The ROX filer is so much more responsive than konqueror and Nautilus, ROX boots in a fraction of the time taken by the big two desktops, it consumes less than half the RAM and it requires much less in the way of disc space and libraries."
The ROX filer component exists as an official Debian package, available from all good Debian mirrors.
Links
Installing ROX on Debian