System:
AthlonXp 2400+
Shuttle AK32VN MoBo
512 mb Ram
80 gb HD
1 gb Swap

Got Gentoo 2004.2 Installed

So, I have everything I could want and love, Gentoo, Fluxbox, and the ATI Drivers working (lol). So All I need is a File Manager so I decided to use Nautilus instead of installing KDE-Base just to get Konqueror. So I install and the Icons and theme is U-G-L-Y, but I have no idea how to change it because there is no gnome-themes-manager or Gnome Start Menu because there is no Gnome. How do you change these icons/themes manually (I'm sure this has been asked many times before, but I can't really find anything on Google or the Gnome User manual)?

Thnx
--Steve


Still a relative

icons..... i don't think its possible manually

themes are easy

~/.gtk-2.0
~/.gtk-1.2-gnome2

those are the theme files for gtk1.2 and gtk2.0 ..... they usually link to somewhere in /usr/share/themes ... iin the gtk theme you could replace the icons, but other then that, i think you have to have install that control panel (cursed gnome .... don't know why you'd want to use nautilus, its based window's explorer, which explains why its so buggy)

What File Manager do you use? I dont really feel like installing Konqueror as that would take installing Kde-Base which i have no need for. What is the best one?

I have a few Live Cds I've tried that use FluxBox as the Window Manager.
In every case, the distro creator included EmelFM as the file manager, in keeping with the idea of small, light, and fast, just like FluxBox, for programs running inside RAM.
I love EmelFM because it's ONLY a file manager, it doesn't pretend to be a web browser also.
That's what FireFox is for.

You can find more info here:
http://emelfm.sourceforge.net/

emelfm is gtk1 and kinda dead as a project. It still works perfectly (except one little glitch that the emelfm-elm guys took care of) and is great (my favorite GUI dual-pane), but those could be issues for you. There's an emelfm2 project that is (surprise) GTK2 based. It kinda loses the point of emelfm's simplicity, but it's somewhat maintained and might do better for some situations.

In my opinion, there is no best file manager. There are two main types and then 'other types' and I don't know that they're entirely comparable. For explorer-type (tree/panel) file managers, there's Nautilus and Konqueror for those desktops (and each can act a little like something else) but the best desktop-agnostic trees are XFE and Endeavour II. The best commander-type (dual-panes) are emelfm and gentoo with an honorable mention to the very weird, ugly, and powerful 'worker'. The best 'other' (non-tree/commander) file manager is rox by light years.

Then, among console file managers, it really sucks that there's no competition. mc is a commander-type and is the only console file manager worth messing with.

And, among 'command-line file managers', I use bash, but zsh is nifty.

rox is excellent...it's quick too...faster than any i've used...give it a try

http://rox.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/index.php/ROX-Filer

Another vote for rox!

I am now test driving Puppy Linux 0.9.7 [FireFox], which is a micro live CD [500MB].
It uses Fvwm95 as the window manager and Rox-Filer.
Rox behaves a little differently than any other file manager I've used, but the more I'm using it the more I like it.
Definitely investigate Rox if you're looking for light and fast !!

I'm currently using FluxBox on Slackware. Does anyone know if Krusader can be used as a standalone file manager without falling into KDE libs depency hell? I have KDE installed as an alternative, but later on I'm planning to run FluxBox only, so I'd like to know if it depends on KDE.

And one more small question: I heard that K3b won't install without a basic KDE install? Any truth to this? In case someone doesn't know, I'm a

Krusader and K3B are both KDE programs and reKwire the kdelibs pacKage at a minimum. And Krusader expeKts to find a few other auKsilary apps liKe KRename and maybe Kompare.

But if you would be keeping the kde packages around anyway, then kde apps will work.

Any app with a K as the first letter, you can usually safely assume that you won't run it without a bunch of KDE libraries installed. I use nautilus as my file manager, works great, looks basic and has the functionality I want. I'm happy, use what suits you best I say

Yeah, nautilus has no dependencies at all.

Just kidding. Basically, almost everything is going to need something - there are CLI apps but then there are ncurses apps (but you're going to have that) and a few pure xlib apps (and if you've got X you'll have those) but then you get into GTK and QT apps - qt apps can run with QT - GTK apps need GTK, pango, atk, maybe another one or two. Off at a tangent, you have your motif or fox or foo or bar or baz apps. And going up on top of QT and GTK, you have your KDE and Gnome apps with varying degrees of integration and dependencies - a Gnome app is going to need dozens of packages because of the way gnome libs are structured. I believe kde apps often just need kdelibs, basically, but are tied into various other things.

And of course, if they do sound, you need all the audio libs. Images, all the image libs. And on and on.

The funny thing about these libs is that the point is to save disk space and RAM. But most people aren't short on disk space and maybe not even RAM. And you might have 5 libs to run one app that no other app uses. It's very easy to have more libs around than you've actually got apps, excluding core CLI tools. So it's the libs taking up all the damn space.

Not only that, but it requires downloading and compiling a zillion things, often getting broken apps, and creates splinters or factions in what apps people can run. Makes me pine for DOS in *that* sense. 'Does this DOS app run on DOS?' doesn't even make any sense. And installing was as easy as running an installer or, better, unzipping. And you could stick it anywhere or delete anything else without much worrying about breaking it. And somehow it all fit on a few floppies and 640K of RAM anyhow.

Whoops. I have these rants sometimes. I'll go away now.