Displaying system info on desktop

[rathod.nikhil@gmail.com]

Hi,
Can anyone tell me how can I display the sys information on the desktop like in the screen shot below. It is of DSL.

Is this feature built into the distribution or any distribution can be configured for this.

Also is this going to cost me something substantial in terms of CPU usage?

[img width=400 height=300]http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/screenshots/scaled/Damn%20Small%20Linux%203.3%20RC1/27.gif[/img]

[jrsoit]

Re: Displaying system info on desktop

The system info in the picture is called a widget. You have to use a program called super karamba, you can find it in the repositories in your adept or synaptic package manager and install it, then all you have to do is find a system info theme that you like to install in karamba, you can find good ones at kde-look.org

[eriefisher]

Re: Displaying system info on desktop

Is this feature built into the distribution or any distribution can be configured for this.

You should be able to use it in any linux distro.

Also is this going to cost me something substantial in terms of CPU usage?

Cpu not so much but if you are already low on ram I would avoid it.

eriefisher

[rathod.nikhil@gmail.com]

Re: Displaying system info on desktop

After installing and running karamba my CPU usage always shows 4% and my RAM usage shows 350 of 440(I got 512 RAM though) after I boot up. and when I start firefox ram usage goes to 410 of 440, Swap usage 0Mb.

So what you all suggest is it fine to keep it running(I dont want any performance degradation).

[jackuess]

Re: Displaying system info on desktop

Actually I believe that it is conky that's being showed in your screen shoot. Super Karamba probably has some nice widgets who does the same work, as mentioned, but conky is quite nice too IMO. There's a good guide on how to get conky up and running over at ubuntuforums: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...ighlight=conky.

[rathod.nikhil@gmail.com]

Re: Displaying system info on desktop

Is conky light on resources then Karamba.
My system is not too old but also not too rich in terms of resources.

AMD Athlon XP 3000+
Ram 512
Right now running on 40GB hd(originally 160 GB)

[Rog131]

Re: Displaying system info on desktop

To jackuess

Thank you of the conky tip

In the Feisty - just install and alt F2: conky

Seems that conky is very light to run

[rathod.nikhil@gmail.com]

Re: Displaying system info on desktop

yeah it worked the way u said.

But I got few concerns

1. conky says 222Mb used out of 440 where as karamba says 382 Mb used out of 440
now which one is right?? Considering I herd that KDE is RAM hungry and I got 2 firefox browsers running.

2. How can I change the default position of conky on the desktop and also how can I make it start automatically when my system boots?

[jackuess]

Re: Displaying system info on desktop

2. How can I change the default position of conky on the desktop

Look for the following section of ~/.conkyrc:

# Text alignment, other possible values are commented
#alignment top_left
alignment top_right
#alignment bottom_left
#alignment bottom_right

# Gap between borders of screen and text
gap_x 10
gap_y 10

I think you'll know what to change, it's pretty self explanatory.

and also how can I make it start automatically when my system boots?

Also, to get Conky to autostart in Kubuntu, you need to add a ]~/.kde/Autostart[/code]

[rathod.nikhil@gmail.com]

Re: Displaying system info on desktop

I tried

free -m

cat /proc/meminfo

commands and both proved that memory information showed by conky is wrong and Karamba is showing the right information........... at least about memory.

[jackuess]

Re: Displaying system info on desktop

I tried

free -m

cat /proc/meminfo

commands and both proved that memory information showed by conky is wrong and Karamba is showing the right information........... at least about memory.

I can't say for sure, bur it's possible that the karamba widget and conky is displaying used ram in different fashions. AFAIK there's never too much actual free ram on a GNU/Linux system, because the ram not used by applications is used as a cache, to speed things up. I.e on my system I have a total of ~1500 MB ram, and "free -m" shows that 1362 is used, which is silly considering what applications I'm running, but if I look closer I can see that 1003 MB is used for the cache, so in reality I have 1362 - 1003 MB of used ram. Maybe it's this amount of ram that conky is showing, and that's really the value that would be more usefull for you. Don't have conky installed my self so I can't test my teory.

[rathod.nikhil@gmail.com]

Re: Displaying system info on desktop

yup you were absolutely right.
free -m shows
used 433Mb buffer 12Mb and cached 185Mb
So the RAM actually used is 433-12-185 = what conky displays.

cool
thanks a lot

[eriefisher]

Re: Displaying system info on desktop

Try:

top

It will show you usage in real time. memory and cpu.

eriefisher

[rathod.nikhil@gmail.com]

Re: Displaying system info on desktop

I dont see

~/.conkyrc

file in my home directory

[jackuess]

Re: Displaying system info on desktop

From the conky man page:

Default configuration file is $HOME/.conkyrc (can be changed from conky.c among other things). See conkyrc.sample. If installing from Debian package, this should be in /usr/share/doc/conky/examples ("gunzip conkyrc.sample.gz" to get conkyrc.sample).

You might want to copy it to $HOME/.conkyrc and then start modifying it. Other configs can be found at http://conky.sf.net

In other words the config file really should be there, but apparently it's not, so just create a new one and paste either the config file from the guide I refered to earlier in the thread, or one of the examples mentioned in the above quote. All the options of the config file are explained in the man page, and conky is very customizable. With a reference .conkyrc and the man page at your hand the possibilities are endless