This is the old ROX web-site. Please use the new website instead.
ROX is a desktop environment, like 
GNOME, KDE and XFCE.
It is an attempt to bring some of the good features from RISC OS to Unix and Linux.
If you want a walk-through with lots of pictures, jump to the Getting Started Guide now!
Linux, Unix and Mac OS X. Basically, anything vaguely Unix-like which can run Gtk applications. Packages have been created specially for RedHat Linux, Mandrake Linux, Debian Linux, Gentoo Linux, SuSE Linux, Slackware Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Fink (MacOS X) and Nasgaïa. In addition, we provide source and binary tarballs, which should install on all similar platforms. Apparently, it can also run on Windows systems, under Cygwin.
If you know of any other distributions that have packaged ROX, please add them above (with a link to the packages or installation instructions, please).
Traditionally, Unix users have always based their activities around the file system. Just about everything that's anything appears as a file: regular files, hardware devices, and even processes on many systems (for example, inside the /proc filesystem on Linux).
However, recent desktop efforts (such as KDE and GNOME) seem to be following the Windows approach of trying to hide the filesystem and get users to do things via a Start-menu or similar. Modern desktop users, on Windows or Unix, often have no idea where their programs are installed, or even where their data files are saved. This leads to a feeling of not being in control, and a poor understanding of how the system works.
The ROX Desktop, however, is based around the file system. Its core component is ROX-Filer, a powerful graphical file manager which, in addition to being a popular filer in its own right, provides a couple of extra features which allow it to solve the above problems...
The first of these features is support for Application Directories. An application directory is a directory which contains an entire application -- its documentation, binaries, source code and so on. When you open an application directory in the filer the application is run. This has some interesting implications:
Here's a screenshot of my ~/Apps directory, where I keep my applications. I use the filer to run them, rather than needing a special launcher program, and I can move, delete and rename them just like my other files and directories.
The second unusual feature is drag-and-drop saving. You've probably already seen DND loading (dragging a file from the filer to an application) but ROX takes this one step further: you can save by dragging the file back from the application into the filer.
This may seem a bit strange at first (especially if you've been using Windows) but you'll quickly start to wish that all applications supported it!
For example, imagine that you're producing a report. All the resources you're using are in /home/fred/Work/July/Report. You create images in one program, graphs in another, and write the text in a third program. Every time you want to save you have to renavigate to the directory using that program's mini-filer (each one is slightly different, of course). This is annoying! With DND saving you could just keep the directory open and drag files into it from each application. This has the additional advantage that after you've saved an image from the Gimp you already have the directory open ready to drag the image straight into Lyx. Assuming that both programs supported DND.
Both of these features are taken from an operating system called RISC OS (ROX stands for `RISC OS on X') which has had them for years. They proved very popular among the users, although the operating system itself had some other short-comings and never enjoyed much commercial success.
ROX-Filer is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
