Root-Portal is a program designed to display files and various other
things on the root window. (the desktop)

See INSTALL for generic installation instructions

Root-Portal comes with a GNOME applet (under Add to panel -> Utility).
If the applet doesn't appear to be available, it may be because GNOME
is installed under /usr, while Root-Portal is installed under
/usr/local.  For some reason (on the author's system at least), GNOME
only looks for applets under the path where it is installed.  If
anyone knows a nice way of fixing this (like if there is a GNOME
config file or environment variable that you can set to specify paths
to search for that kind of stuff), please let me know.  The best way
as a user to get around it, is assuming your GNOME is installed in
/usr, to install Root-Portal from a binary package (deb, rpm etc).
Failing that however, it should work to specify that you want
root-portal installed under /usr (although stuff installed from source
(not by the packaging system) should really go under /usr/local).
Anyway, to do this do:

./configure --prefix=/usr && make && sudo make install

Or something like that.

