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Reading the Changelog all the way back to the very first entries shows that GKrellM began life in July of 1999, when Bill Wilson ported an earlier xforms monitor program to Gtk/Imlib. Must have been a good job of porting, too, because Brian Almeida began packaging it for Debian (unstable) in August of that same year. That was version 0.6.3-1. It showed up on freshmeat.net that month, and it's been adding enthusiastic users, plug-ins, and themes ever since.

Red Hat 9.0 includes GKrellM version 2.1.5-3, but I found a more recent version on Matthias Saou's excellent RPM repository freshrpms.net. I grabbed a RH9-specific RPM for release 2.1.21-1 there and installed it. More and more these days, freshrpms.net is where I turn first for my Red Hat 9.0 RPMs.

The default configuration of GKrellM (shown below) gives you the following information: machine name, date, time, graphics CPU, proc and disk utilization, Ethernet activity, timer, memory and swap activity, and uptime. But that's just the beginning. The thing that makes GKrellM such a popular play-pretty with geeks is that it is almost infinitely configurable, extensible, and themeable.

You can configure GKrellM by right-clicking on the monitor and selecting Configuration from the drop-down menu, or at anytime while GKrellM has the focus by pressing the F1 key. The configuration menu lets you address general options, built-in monitors, plug-ins, and themes.

Under general options, for example, you can set the periodicity of monitor updates and the width of the GKrellM display. You can also choose to display/not display the Hostname and System name, remember the screen position and use the same one next time the program is run, and also allow multiple instances to run concurrently. General properties include sticky-state, placement above or under other windows, dock or panel window, taskbar inclusion, and other choices. That's quite a bit to start with, but it's not nearly the whole of it.

Under the Builtins options you find configuration categories for Sensors, Clock, CPU, Proc, Disk, Internet, Net, Memory, File System, Mail, Battery, and Uptime. The Internet options are particularly nice. You can monitor specific ports (or port ranges) and control how often the monitor is updated.

Curious about how many probes you're getting on those troublesome Windows NetBIOS ports? GKrellM can tell you. Once at the Configuration screen, click on Builtins->Internet. Then, under Data 0, enter "NetBIOS" for the label, 137 as port 0, and 139 as port 1, and check the "Port 0-1 is a range" box. Now click add, and you can see the new "NetBIOS" monitor immediately in the GKrellM display.

There are dozens of plug-ins: 82 monitoring plug-ins are listed on the GKrellM homepage, along with another half dozen for configuration or documentation. I didn't know where to start, so I went back to freshrpms.net and took the easy way out by downloading three RPMs containing plug-ins: one for utilities, one for miscellaneous, and one for multimedia plug-ins.

After downloading and installing gkrellm-plugins-utils-2.1.12-fr2.i386.rpm and restarting GKrellM, I found I had three new plug-ins installed: Reminder, GkrellShoot, and gldeds. The most interesting of the three was GkrellShoot. It consists of a screen-saver-like image in a monitor (selectable, of course) with Lock and Shoot buttons beneath it. Clicking on Lock locks the desktop. Clicking on Shoot lets you capture a screen image, single window, or entire screen. I hacked the configuration to use the Gimp to display the screenshot instead of ee.

Next came gkrellm-plugins-misc-2.1.12-fr2.i386.rpm. After installing that collection I noticed three additional plug-ins: Flynn, GKrellWeather, and Background Changer. And there are plenty more out there where those came from.

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