Although you won’t find all of the standard features found in most modern file managers, you will find emelFM2 has a few tricks of its own that make it worth (at least) giving a try. And, of course, any old school user will be happy to have this file manager sitting alongside the standard Nautilus, Dolphin, or Thunar.

In this Ghacks article I will show you how to install and make use of the emelFM2 file manager.

Installation

Since emelFM2 is a GTK+ toolkit it’s fairly universal on X11 systems. I found emelFM2 in both the standard repositories for Ubuntu 10.04 and Fedora 13. So installation can be as simple as:

1. Open up your Add/Remove Software tool.
2. Search for “emelfm2″ (no quotes).
3. Mark emelFM2 for installation.
4. Click Apply to install.

Once installed, you will find emelFM2 in Start > System Tools > emelFM2.

Usage

Figure 1

When you start up emelFM2 the window that greets you will look very familiar (see Figure 1). If you’ve ever used Midnight Commander or even an FTP application like gFTP, you will be immediately at home with emelFM2.

Let’s say you want to move a file (or directory) from one location to another. To do so you would navigate on the left pane to the source, select the file (or folder), navigate on the right to the target, and then click the Move button in the middle of the panes.

Or say you want to just open a file. To do this you would navigate to the location of the file on either the left or right pane, and double click the file to open it. You could also right-click the file and select from any number of actions (such as change ownership, change permissions, copy, link, link-as, delete, and more).

Other features

Naturally, a tool like this would need some other features to make it attractive. And emelFM2 doesn’t disappoint. One of the nice handier features of emelFM2 is the built-in command line tool. at the bottom of the window you will see a small text area (see Figure 1). This text area allows you to enter commands that will be enacted upon the selected file.

You can also calculate disk usage of items. You might be asking yourself why this would be useful, since the file size is already displayed in the main panes. The disk usage tool allows you to calculate the exact file size of either a single file or multiple files. With this you can select multiple files and the click the disk usage button (bottom section of the window, eighth icon from the right) to give you the total amount used by the selected files.

emelFM2 also allows you to mount/unmount devices. To unmount a device you would select the device in either pane and then click the unmount icon (fourth button from the right near the bottom of the window). To mount a device you use the same process.

emelFM2 also has an interesting take on the filtering task. If you click the Filter icon (top right, third from the right for the right pane, top left, third from the left for the left pane) a drop-down will appear allowing you to select from:

• Name Filter
• Size Filter
• Date Filter
• Directories too

When you select any of he top three a new window will open allowing you to create a specific filter. For example, if you want to filter only files modified since a specific date, you would do the following:

Select the Date Filter

In the resulting window select “modified since” from the drop-down.

Enter the date you want to specify.

Click OK.

Figure 2

As soon as you click OK the directory will be refreshed to show only the results that match your filter. You will know when a directory is being filtered because the filter icon will have a line slashed through it (see Figure 2).

Final thoughts

Although many users might find emelFM2 a bit out-dated, anyone that was weened on the likes of Midnight Commander will find themselves right at home with this fast, light file manager. And with a few extra features rolled in, emelFM2 is an attractive alternative to the usual fare.

That is where applications like Gkrellm comes in. Gkrellm is a small stack of system monitors that is configurable and themeable. Using this application can solve a lot of your problems when using a lightweight desktop.

Included Monitors

• Gkrellm includes the following monitors:
• Hostname/Systemname display
• Clock/Calendar
• CPU Monitor
• Temp/Fan/Voltage
• Process Monitor
• Disk Monitor
• Net Monitor
• Memory/Swap Space Usage
• File System Monitor
• Mailbox Monitor
• Battery Meter
• Uptime

Getting and Installing

Installing Gkrellm is simple. You can either do a search in your Add/Remove Software utility, do a search for “gkrellm”, select the correct results, and apply the changes. From the command line you can run a command like sudo apt-get install gkrellm or yum install gkrellm. To start Gkrellm you can issue the command gkrellm to start up the monitoring system.

Gkrellm Main Window

The Gkrellm interface is very easy to read. As you can see (in the image to the left) the monitors are very clear and well designed. In the image you see I have running Systemname, Calendar/Time, CPU, Disk, Wireless, Memory, Swap, Battery, and Uptime. You can also see the Memory and Swap monitors are showing no information. Some of the monitors are “interactive”. By that you can click that particular monitor to stop monitoring. Click again and the monitoring stops. NOTE: Not all monitors are interactive (but all are configurable.)

Speaking of configuring, there are two ways to configure Gkrellm. You can right-click the window to open up a menu that offers the Configuration entry. Or you can click F1 when your mouse is in the Gkrellm window.

The configuration is very simple and straight-forward. From here you can configure which monitors to include, the theme to use, general options (which apply to the Gkrelm window itself), and any plugins you might have installed.

Configuration Window

The configuration of all aspects of Gkrellm is simple. But most important is how to include a monitor. As you can see (in the image to the right) there is a listing for each built in monitor. Click on the monitor you want to add or remove and you will see, near the top of the options in the right pane, a check box to include the monitor. If you want to remove that monitor simply uncheck the box. The changes happen in real-time so there is no need to click OK (unless you want to dismiss the options window.)

Themes

Who wants to have a monitoring window on their desktop that doesn’t match their desktop theme? And for that Gkrellm has a number of built-in themes. Click on the Theme entry from the configuration options and scroll through the various themes. You can also install themes. Find some themes from such a site as Freshmeat and untar the files in ~/.gkrellm/themes/. Restart Gkrellm and the themes will appear in the Themes section of the configuration window.

Final Thoughts

Gkrellm allows me to use my favorite Linux desktop and not miss out on simple necessities such as time, system stats, etc. If you’re looking for an easy to use system monitor, Gkrellm is what you need.