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F7 Programing Applications & General Utilities — xosview

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Assistant Professor Gregory R. Kriehn
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F7 xosview
xosview is another old favorite, and can be used to display the status of several system based parameters, including CPU usage, load average, memory usage, swap space usage, network usage (including NFS mounts), interrupts, and serial port status. I use it in conjunction with gkrellm and xload to monitor my overall system status. It gives me a quick visualization to see if my server is getting hammered, if I have a runaway process that is needlessly chewing up CPU cycles, and as a general check for the overall health of the computer. Unfortunately, development of xosview has slowed to a crawl over the years, although the latest source code does compile and keep tabs on the 2.6 version of the Linux kernel. For Fedora Core 5, someone went through trouble of creating an rpm specific to FC5 users — thankfully, the rpm also works for F7. To install the program, point your web browser to:

ftp://ftp.tigress.co.uk/pub/gpl/5.0.0/xosview-1.8.3-1.tig1.fc5.i386.rpm

Once you download the program, change to the ~/Desktop directory:
~> cd ~/Desktop
and install the rpm:
~> sudo rpm -vhi xosview-1.8.3-1.tig1.fc5.i386.rpm
You should see xosview successfully install:
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
   1:xosview                ########################################### [100%]
Once finished, source your ~/.tcshrc file:
~> source ~/.tcshrc
and xosview is ready to be launched:
~> xosview &
Preferences for xosview can be set in your ~/.Xresources file. I have differing preferences for my server and laptop:

Server Preferences
xosview*NFSDStats:      True
xosview*NFSStats:       True
xosview*battery:        False
xosview*net:            True
xosview*interrupts:     False
Laptop Preferences
xosview*NFSStats:       True
xosview*battery:        True
xosview*net:            True
xosview*interrupts:     False
Once set, use xrdb to load your preferences into memory.
~> xrdb ~/.Xresources
The next time you launch xosview, you will see your preferences take effect. Look at the man page to view the myriad of configuration options, if you wish to add or subtract from those listed above.