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.

Display Fusion can be used to manage dual monitors, or even triple or more, on Windows XP and Windows Vista. The basic option is to choose either a wallpaper for each monitor separately or choose an image or color that spans across all monitors. This is a function that should have been implemented in Windows Vista but I guess Microsoft had enough work to implement drm to Vista.

Another option of Display Fusion is the ability to choose that the wallpaper should fit the width or height but remain aspect ratio which is great if you want to use non-widescreen wallpapers on widescreen monitors for instance.

A bonus is the integration of Flickr which lets you search for and download wallpapers from the popular image portal.

Display Fusion integrates shortcuts nicely which add several functions that make it easier to work with dual monitors. Some hotkeys include the ability to move windows to the next monitor in line, stretch windows across all monitors and moving windows to the center of the current screen.

Read More:

Display Fusion Homepage
via How to Geek

I came upon ZoneOS ZoneScreen at the donation coder blog which always has some great tips about new freeware. ZoneScreen supports multiple screens over network which means that you do not need an adapter that supports dual monitors, all you need are two devices that can be connected over a network.

As you can see on the picture to the left a notebook and a desktop computer display part of the same application. It is possible to use this on PDAs as well which makes it a great tool for system administrators for example who can carry the PDA with them that displays the most important information.

ZoneScreen consists of two parts: kernel-mode (running with privileges of Windows kernel) driver for virtual display (which is visible to Windows just as normal video card with monitor attached to it), and user-mode (running as usual user application like Notepad) wizard which is responsible for capturing image, transmitting it over the network, and drawing it at another computer.

Machine, whose desktop is extended, called server. Server machine have display driver installed and ZoneScreen wizard running in server mode. Another machine which acts only as external display called client. Client machine have only ZoneScreen wizard running in client mode.

Both parts of ZoneScreen (driver and wizard) are completely independent and can be used separately. This mean that in case we are interested only in mirroring desktop image, we do not need to install virtual display driver, and if we are extending desktop with ZoneScreen display driver we could use any other software, for example RealVNC, for transmitting desktop image over the network (in this case we need transfer only space of virtual display).