Roland's desktop page

Below is a screenshot of my current destop. I use neither GNOME nor KDE, because they’re very resource-intensive and clutter my desktop too much.

In this shot you see the lightweight FVWM2 window manager on top of the X window system running on FreeBSD 6.2-STABLE. It is still the same now that I’m running 8.0-RELEASE. When I like a look, I stick with it. The window manager is configured to emulate the old SGI Indigo Magic scheme. The desktop image is something I cooked up with a NASA image I found on Wikipedia.

Top left is the conky system monitor, showing CPU, disk and internet connection status graphs among other things. Top right is the FvwmPager module, showing the available desktops.

In between them is Emacs showing the source for the previous version of this page in nxml-mode. Below it is the Gimp, wearing GTK+’s xfce-smooth theme.

Below conky and at the right-bottom are a set of graphs generated in the same style. The data for the temperature graph is collected by a shell-script using mbmon, part of the xmbmon package, and graphed with gnuplot. The data for the network graphs is collected from the pf firewall by a perl script using pfstat. The data is then transformed by a the script into a form usable by gnuplot, because gnuplot’s graphing capabilities far exceed those of pfstat. The scripts for data collection and graph generation are run every minute as cron jobs. Finally, telak is used for putting the generated PNG pictures on the desktop.

In the background on the left bottom is a transparent and borderless rxvt-unicode window running bash. Rxvt-unicode supports transparency with the -tr option. A window without borders is created by assigning the window a name (with the -name urxvt_transp option), and creating a style for this window in ~/.fvwm/config;

# Special style for invisible Urxvt
Style "urxvt_transp" !Title,!Button,!Borders,!Handles,StaysOnBottom

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