Exploring the Gentoo File Manager
ONE FOR ALL
KDE users choose Konqueror, Gnomers use Nautilus, and commandline
fans extol the virtues of Midnight Commander. Gentoo gives you
the best of all these worlds – a desktop independent file manager.
Many Linux users primarily associate
the name Gentoo with a
popular do-it-yourself distribution.
In fact, the distribution has nothing
to do with the file manager of the same
name. As the file manager’s homepage
tells you [1], both projects are aware
that they share a name, and neither of
them minds. This would be unthinkable
for commercial software, but it works
fine for Gentoo. Both Gentoos have
something in common, flexibility! The
file manager gives you an enormous
range of configuration options to meet
your needs, and that makes it an indispensable
companion on your desktop.
Installation
Many distributions, including Suse,
Debian, or Mandrake Linux, have their
own Gentoo packages, so you can use
your distro’s package manager to install
Gentoo. If your distribution
does not have a
binary, or if you prefer
to use the latest Version
0.11.54, you will
need to build from the
source code. After
downloading the
archive from [2],
unpack the file and
change to the directory
that this step creates.
Gentoo is based on the
Gimp Toolkit (gtk),
version 1.2.x, so you
will need the matching
developer packages to
build and install the
file manager. Make sure the requirements
are fulfilled, and then go on to
build and install Gentoo with the normal
three commands: ./configure, make, and
su -c “make install”.
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