Which Norton Commander style filemanager do you recommend?

Midnight Commander sounds like what you want:

sudo apt-get install mc

I had the same question some time ago. And I tried all of the mentioned commanders. Krusader is by far the best one but I didn't want to have whole bunch of KDE libraries installed. Gnome-Commander cripples system theme in order to get some more speed (I guess) but it doesn't support tabs. Mucommander is Java based and lacks integration with system (and it's Java based, did I mention that already). There's also TuxCommander which (at the moment) is not listed but that thing was made using Borland Kylix (now dead project) so its development is stopped or at least doomed. Midnight Commander is really really good, but am not that much of a terminal fan.

So, I did the only thing I could do... started making my own. Now I know how this sounds and am not going to praise it. It is still faaar from finished but I got some basics done. Also I try to add interesting and useful things to it. For example you can create terminal tab from the current tabs location. There's an option for create file as well as create directory. Oh, and command line history is loaded from .bash_history (one of these days am going to make 2 way sync with that file).

Check it out...

It sill needs a lot of work, and it's far from finished but if you don't mind trying out new things feel free to try it out. Also, any feedback is more than welcome.

GNOME Commander would be the most obvious choice. I don't use a specifically dual paned file manager so I couldn't really say which was best.

sudo apt-get install gnome-commander

It's also worth noting that you can get a dual pane mode with Nautilus by pressing F3.