ROX-Filer 2.5

guy — Mon Jul 10, 2006 7:48 pm

Author: guy

Posted: Mon Jul 10, 2006 7:48 pm

ROX-Filer 2.5 is out now!

http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/ROX-Filer

ROX-Filer is a small, fast, powerful filer for Unix, Linux and compatible
systems. Its user interface is based on the RISC OS filer, and it supports
similar concepts, such as application directories, drag-and-drop saving
and popup menus. It implements a RISC OS like pinboard, and a panel which
can be used in a similar way to the RISC OS iconbar. It also supports many
features not found in RISC OS, including thumbnails of images, keyboard
short-cuts, custom menus, many more options, powerful search facilities,
etc.

ROX-Filer can be used on its own, with another desktop (such as GNOME, KDE
or XFCE), or as the core component of the ROX desktop. The ROX desktop
aims to bring all the good features of RISC OS to modern systems.
The project web pages get around one hundred thousand hits per month, and
the mailing lists have seen over ten thousand posts.

Get ROX-Filer here:

http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/HelpInstalling

To get the whole desktop, just download the ROX-All pacakge from here:

http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/ROX-All

Screenshots (including many contributed by our users):

http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/screenshots
http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/guide

The filer is distributed under the GNU General Public License, which
means that anyone can modify it, use bits of it in their own (GPL)
programs, etc. Indeed, many of the improvements made to the filer were
added by other ROX users and posted as patches to the mailing list.

Changes since ROX-Filer 2.4:

New features:

- Allow pinboard and panel icons to be locked (Dennis Tomas, suggested
by Abrolag).

- Display extra information in properties box for desktop files (Stephen
Watson).

- Allow setting icons in the AppInfo.xml file (Dennis Tomas). Example:

<AppMenu>
<Item option="--options" icon="gtk-preferences">...</Item>
</AppMenu>

- Added SetIcon and UnsetIcon SOAP calls (Jonatan Liljedahl). With this
you can have your volume manager (like ivman) set icons for the
mounted media that represents what type of media it is (cdr, cdrw, usb
stick, etc).

- Right-clicking on the Show/hide button now turns thumbnails on and off
(Peter Federighi).

- Added options to change the "mount" and "umount" commands (Thomas
Leonard). This may be useful for using programs such as "pmount" and
"pumount" (which allow mounting removable media without an fstab
entry, or encrypted filesystems).

- Added a 'Manage Thumbnails' link to the Options box (Thomas Leonard).
If 0launch isn't available, tell the user the URL of the program we
were trying to run so they can get it themselves. Tell users about
right-click behaviour in a tooltip (Thomas Leonard).

Changes:

- Removed separator from icon properties dialog box (Thomas Leonard).

- Updated Word MIME type for new MIME database (Keith Warno).

- When the handler for a MIME type is a symlink to a program, run the
program using the target of the symlink rather than the link itself so
that programs like gvim see the right name and behave correctly
(Thomas Leonard, reported by Keith Warno).

- Use full URI, not local path, for DocBook stylesheet (P�r Forsling).

- When setting or clearing a globicon, redraw pinboard and panel icons
too (Dennis Tomas).

- When loading MIME icons from the current theme only get the pathname
from GTK, but actually load it through our own cache (Thomas Leonard).
GTK was loading a new copy of the image each time!

- Changed name of save settings menu option to be more explicit (Stephen
Watson).

- In many .desktop files there is no "%F" or similar parameter to the
"Exec" entry, although the application can open files. Work around
this problem by adding the arguments to the end of the command in this
case (Dennis Tomas).

- Added Zero Install source interface (Thomas Leonard). Run this with
0launch to compile against the GTK and GLib 2.4 headers (which will be
downloaded automatically). This produces a binary that runs with these
older versions, as well as with all later releases. Note that this has
been somewhat superceded by the GTK-2.4 compatibility environment:

http://0install.net/2006/interfaces/GTK-2.4.xml

- New type for XML files; "application/" rather than "text/" to match
freedesktop.org updates (Thomas Leonard).

- Moved test for a hidden file into its own function. Allows us to
define additional tests as to whether a file is hidden, rather than
just the first character of the file name (Stephen Watson).

- Updated source file headers by removing the Id line, updating the
year and clarifying the copyrights (Thomas Leonard).

- The monospace font for the list view is now configurable via a
ViewDetails::mono-font gtkrc entry (Stephen Watson).

- When iconfiying a window, try to find space on the pinboard of the
current screen first (Tony Houghton).

- Updated the help text for rox --help (Andras Mohari).

- Use a monospace font for the size and permissions columsn in the list
view (Andras Mohari).

Bug fixes:

- When a panel icon's image changed, the display didn't update (Thomas
Leonard, reported by Dennis Tomas).

- Any line in a .desktop file would be ignored if there was a blank line
directly before it (Dennis Tomas).

- Escape " characters when generating translations for the Options.xml
file (Andras Mohari).

- When reading the output from 'du' for the Properties box, set the
channel's encoding to NULL to avoid errors with non-UTF-8 filenames
(Andras Mohari).

- When running ROX-Filer for the first time ever, don't tell users that
the Choices directory has been migrated unless they already had one.
Also, don't bother creating symlinks to the new locations in this
case. Other applications have had a while to catch up to the new
system, and the message is rather confusing to new users (Thomas
Leonard).

Translations:

- Updated Chinese Translations (Babyfai Cheung).

- Updated French manual translation (Arnaud Calvo).

- Updated French translation (Vincent Lef�vre).

- Updated Hungarian translation and converted to UTF-8 (Andras Mohari).

- Updated Italian translation (Yuri Bongiorno).

- Updated Russian translation (Nikita E. Shalaev).

- Added Ukrainian translation (Yourko).

- Added Vietnamese translation (Xomhau Newnick).

- Updated instructions for creating a translation (reported by Yourko).

- Make sure all the help message is translatable (Stephen Watson,
reported by Andras Mohari).

ADDRESSES

There are installation and getting started guides available. The getting
started guide has lots of screenshots and may be interesting to people
thinking of trying ROX, or wondering what it looks like.

http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/HelpInstalling
http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/guide

There are two mailing lists; rox-users and rox-devel. You can subscribe
here, or look at the archives:

http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/lists

We have a mail-to-news gateway, so you can keep up with the lists
using your favourite newsreader if you don't want your inbox flooded (see
above link). You can also chat to us using IRC:

http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/chat

A selection of tutorials on writing ROX applications is available on-line:

http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/devel

OTHER NEWS

See the news page for more details and links:

http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/node

Enjoy!

--
Dr Thomas Leonard http://rox.sourceforge.net
GPG: 9242 9807 C985 3C07 44A6 8B9A AE07 8280 59A5 3CC1

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