In the quest to try out Nautilus in an Openbox environment I dusted off an old version of Scorpio and went to work on it - you can tell it's old, it still has Midori on it! I removed Thunar and deps and installed Nautilus, Nautilus-actions, gvfs and gvfs-backends.
Download ISO 411mb
Download md5 55bytes
Nautilus has changed a lot since I last tried it. It no longer takes over the desktop unless there is extra software installed specifically for that. So it is now a true standalone file manager.
The Scorpio "desktop" has the embedded urxvt terminal, conky and supposedly docker in the bottom right corner with Volumeicon and WICD - good theory, gotta work out why the icons aren't showing in the remaster. Pytyle is active - A-a to tile and A-u to untile on the fly. Somebody try it and tell me what they think!
Theme wise I seem to have hit the GTK2/3 issue - still getting my brain around the GTK .ini file! Haven't worked out yet if Nautilus can carry over its settings without loading half of Gnome because so far I can't find a config file, so what you get is the default icon look. Easy enough to change to list as I like to. Nautilus-actions appear in the contextual menu, giving the options of editing a file as root, opening a folder as root, or setting wallpaper. Needless to say the first two won't work in the live root session!!
I haven't tried installing this one, but it boots live. This is just an intro to Nautilus and how it works. But by all means, feel free to install it if you want - let me know if Docker fixes itself! By the way, there is no Synaptic.
Networking is achieved by opening Nautilus and going to "File - Connect to Server". In my case I chose SSH, made sure the Port is 22, entered the server details including address, name and password and hit connect. The server computer immediately opened in a new window. Whilst the connection is open, but not necessarily the FM, Nautilus will display a network link in the sidebar. I haven't been able to try the Windows share option. Feedback on how that works would be appreciated.
Nautilus has tabs, and if you hit F3 it goes twin pane. Cool! It also has its own search function that seems to work well. There is also the option of scripted actions that mean you can get Nautilus to act on your own scripts rather than installing Nautilus-actions. Or have both!
So far it seems to be working well. If Nautilus-actions are left out there is only about 25mb of Nautilus involved - less than Spacefm from memory. Although the RAM reading in live looks high at 150-160mb, on bare metal it doesn't idle over 85mb. The only real downside to it all is simply a philosphical one - Nautilus is designed for Gnome, so there is always the sneaking feeling that it's not quite meant for funny places like OB!! True standalone file manager - yes and no. It does work fine on its own, but it can be a slippery slope adding more Gnome bits to use more of its potential. Theme, colour, decoration, configuration file - where do you stop? The other aspect is not being able to trust the Gnome devs completely - you just never know what they might bork next! However it's definitely worth perservering with, and if it doesn't embarrass itself totally I might even make it default on Scorpio. The ability to do lists properly, to network, the options of tabs and twin pane - it's got all the potential of a great package.
Enjoy
