I am working on an embedded system with RH 7.3 it has X(?) but does not appear to have any desktop or file manager. I want to add a GUI file manager. Space is limited the system currently boots from a 512mB flash card.

I am not a linux person and am learning slowly. I need pretty detailed instructions on what, where, and how

Thanks,

robert

if you don't have X that might be a problem, however if a file manager is what you want you could look into midnight commander
http://www.midnight-commander.org/, not exactly 'gui' but a file manager nonetheless
p.s. redhat 7.3 is really, really old so finding packages to work with it might prove difficult, but not impossible..

I'm not sure there were any graphical package managers in 2002 (when RH 7.3 was released). Why are you using such a dated distro? You may have better luck using something newer like Debian, CentOS (RH Enterprise Clone), or Fedora (RH community edition). Other than Debian, those distros may be a little bloated for embedded space. You can try Embedded Debian (there's lots of documentation and howto stuff).

Maybe try one of these embedded distros?

NOTE: I don't do embedded systems development, just sort of understand that the embedded space is a different animal than your typical desktop applications.

EDIT: Ah... FILE manager... Duh... Yeah, midnight commander may be your best bet.

RedHat 7.3 was a pretty stable release, so it has survived even some RedHat 8 and 9 installation for some time. It's outdated, but that doesn't mean that you can not compile your choice of window manager for it.

RH 7.3 was using XFree86 (nowadays it's Xorg), but otherwise X11 runs fine. You will certainly find some WindowMaker rpm packages on the RH 7.3 install disks. WindowMaker has very modest system resource requirements and it runs significantly better on older or embedded hardware then Gnome, KDE.

Fluxbox would be my other choice, but you will have to compile that one from source on your RH 7.3 system.

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T74marcell

Arch Linux