Root-Portal 0.5.2 review

Root-Portal is a GNOME program that monitors files, processes etc and displays changes either directly to the desktop or in a transpa

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: David Price & Michael Lucas-Smith

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Root-Portal is a GNOME program that monitors files, processes etc and displays changes either directly to the desktop or in a transparent border-less window. This is useful for monitoring system logs and for providing feedback on system activities.

Root Portal is a way to do stuff on your desktop in the background. We find it useful as a monitor of system log files such as /var/log/messages and /var/log/xferlog and /var/log/httpd/access_log etc etc.

You can have as many spots, or 'portals' of text on the screen as you want in varying size and varying font and colour and practically any other property you care to think of. They can have the added advantage of being transcient so that you can still see your background picture underneith the text.

As well as this, using the roottext module, you can run programs such as xsnow and the snow flakes will not disappear because of the text, they will pass through it. Using the module such as gnometext allows you to shade the background and put alternate images as backgrounds for your portals.

You may also shade these custom backgrounds, the only disadvantage to this system is that programs such as xsnow cannot mix their graphics with this and disappear behind them. The only other difference between the two is that the root text can handle non-fixed sized fonts with a breeze.

Because the gnome module is using zvt, it currently does no like non-fixed sized fonts too much at all. We are hoping the author of zvt will change this in later releases of his library. As well as the file tailing facility to monitor log files, there is also a loading monitor, to show you when a new process has been created and when a process has been destroyed.
Basically this is a pretty anti-paranoia program for people who sit at their desktops and wonder who is doing what to them from the outside, what is running what on their system, and why their harddisk is suddenly ticking over for no reason *aha, crond is doing something weird*

Requirements:
GTK+
GNOME
ZVT (usually comes with GNOME)
GNOME-XML (it seems that autoconf doesn't check this at the moment)
You'll need version 1.x (version 2.x isn't supported at present)
libstdc++ (root-portal is written in C++ so you'll need this)