Two of the best I found was KeyCounter and KeyCounter (yes, the same name). The feature I like best in the first KeyCounter is that by doble clicking on its tray icon you can see a daily graph of your keystrokes. You can also view your history for each previous day. My problem with it is that it does not give you an easy way of exporting your data. It keeps its data in its own directory in files with the extension of “.day”. This can be opened by notepad if you want and with some macros you could make them exportable in a few formats, but no easy way.

The second KeyCounter however has much nicer features. You can control which keys to monitor, you can chooseo nly letters, only numbers, F1-F12, etc., and any combinations of these.  You can view keystroke counts for each letter separately, and also take a look at the total number. Although there is no built in graphing, you can export to CSV automatically, which you can then plot in Excel, or some other spreadsheet editor.

This application is better in all aspects, so I would say go with this one (it has a nicer icon too), but quick graphing would be great, if that’s all you need, go for the first. Two runners up were Keystroke Counter (hey, different name!), and yes, wait for it, Keycounter. Sigh… At least the “c” is not caps here.

Keystroke counter is extremely simple, and would actually be pretty useful, but each time you press a button, a darned baloon tip comes up with your keystrokes and stays there. Keycounter is for the more programming savvy group. I didn’t give that one a go, but the promary focus is not on human readability. You can make sense out of the files, but the author’s main intent was to gather data for applications later on, like plotting it with the Google Chart API.

While the first two are cool, if you want to get into some programming fun, you might want to take a look at the second batch, as both of these have their source posted and freely available.

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.