I’ve just discovered a GKrellm replacement, kind of like gDesklets called Conky. Its pretty nice as it draws itself on the X11 root window (known as the desktop/wallpaper to mere mortals).

img

Its very customisable, you can gather the information from commands such as lmsensors and ifconfig. Here’s my .conkyrc, I still need to figure out how to remove spaces before the %age sign.

own_window yes
own_window_colour brown
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_type override
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager
double_buffer yes
use_spacer right
use_xft yes
alignment bottom_right
gap_x 10
gap_y 10
update_interval 2.0
maximum_width 250
stippled_borders 3
border_margin 9
border_width 10
default_color grey
draw_outline no
draw_borders no
font Monospace:size=8:weight=bold
uppercase no
draw_shades yes
TEXT
${color orange}SYSTEM INFORMATION ${hr 2}$color
${color white}${time %A},${time %e} ${time %B} ${time %G}
${color white}Machine$color $nodename (up $uptime_short)
${color white}Kernel$color  $kernel
${color orange}CPU USAGE ${hr 2}$color
Core0 ${tab 40} (${cpu cpu1}%) Core1 ${tab 40} (${cpu cpu2}%)
${cpugraph cpu1 25,120 000000 ff6600 } ${cpugraph cpu2 25,120 000000 cc0033}
Core2 ${tab 40} (${cpu cpu3}%) Core3 ${tab 40} (${cpu cpu4}%)
${cpugraph cpu3 25,120 000000 ff6600 } ${cpugraph cpu4 25,120 000000 cc0033}
${color orange}TEMPERATURES ${hr 2}$color
Core0: ${execi 20 sensors |grep 'Core 0:' | cut -d" " -f8} ${alignr}GPU:   +${execi 60 nvidia-settings -q gpucoretemp | grep '):' | awk '{print $4}' | cut -c -2}.0°C
Core1: ${execi 20 sensors |grep 'Core 1:' | cut -d" " -f8} ${alignr}Therm: ${execi 20 sensors |grep 'temp1:' | cut -d" " -f8}
Core2: ${execi 20 sensors |grep 'Core 2:' | cut -d" " -f8} ${alignr}Case:  ${execi 20 sensors |grep 'temp2:' | cut -d" " -f8}
Core3: ${execi 20 sensors |grep 'Core 3:' | cut -d" " -f8} ${alignr}HDD:   +${execi 60 hddtemp -n /dev/sdb}.0°C
${color orange}TOP 5 PROCESSES ${hr 2}$color
${color #ff9999}NAME               PID      CPU      MEM
${color #ffff99}1. ${top name 1}${top pid 1}   ${top cpu 1}   ${top mem 1}$color
2. ${top name 2}${top pid 2}   ${top cpu 2}   ${top mem 2}
3. ${top name 3}${top pid 3}   ${top cpu 3}   ${top mem 3}
4. ${top name 4}${top pid 4}   ${top cpu 4}   ${top mem 4}
5. ${top name 5}${top pid 5}   ${top cpu 5}   ${top mem 5}
${color orange}MEMORY / DISK ${hr 2}$color
${color white}RAM    $color $memperc% ${membar 6}$color
${color white}/      $color ${fs_used_perc /}% ${fs_bar 6 /}$color 
${color white}/data7 $color ${fs_used_perc /data7}% ${fs_bar 6 /data7}$color 
${color orange}ETH0 (${addr eth0}) ${hr 2}$color
${color white}Down:$color ${downspeed eth0}KB/s${alignr}${color white}Up:$color ${upspeed eth0}KB/s
${downspeedgraph eth0 25,120 000000 00ff00} ${alignr}${upspeedgraph eth0 25,120 000000 ff0000}$color

I also figured out how to stop NTFS-3g from automounting my Vista partition:

/usr/bin/polkit-auth --explicit-detail
/usr/bin/polkit-auth --revoke org.freedesktop.hal.storage.mount-fixed