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I am looking for very very light X applications for use on an ltsp server.
I have already decided on fluxbox (it is much faster than xfce) and rxvt for terminal emulation.
What are good choices for lightweight office applications and a lightweight program for file browsing like nautilus?
A lot of the lightweight distros I play with use ROX desktop for their file managing:
http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/static.html
Also.. it's not really *graphical*, but you can do all the same things with mc (midnight commander).
I don't think you're going to have a lot of choices for office suites. I know SIAG Office is supposed to be a lightweight replacement, but I don't think it being actively developed. Looking at the site they just made a new release Nov of last year, but the release before that was in 2003. A good replacement would be using Abiword and Gnumeric, but I'm not sure if Gnumeric depends on the GNOME.
Use vim with latex to typeset and your office app will be really light.
For file manager, I'll second Rox, as suggested by techieMoe - it's fast, lightweight, and powerful.
It's feels a bit awkward and difficult trying to get used to it at first, but if you'll stick with it for a week or two, you'll love it. There are a number of other lightweight file managers but I've tried just about all of them and Rox wins for my own needs:
http://rox.sourceforge.net/desktop/static.html
Do you suggest using the whole rox de or just the file manager?
Well, it's really supposed to be used with the whole DE. The ROX DE, as described by the website, is supposed to make everything like the RISC OS, and unless you have the complete DE I don't see how you could be the whole "experience" behind it.