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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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.