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*
This program is based off an older program that we found called
root-tail (link is no
longer valid, but see the similar programs section)
by Mike Baker (see below)
Authors, contributors, credits etc:
David Price (mantys@goldweb.com.au)
Michael Lucas-Smith (sain@driftwood.darktech.org) - previously an active author
Adam Keys (akeys at post.cis.smu.edu) - occasional contributer
Sourav K. Mandal (Sourav.Mandal at ikaran.com) - contributed Consoledump module and other fixes
Martin Greenaway (gre at dynamite.com.au) - program icon
uses code from root-tail by Mike Baker (mbm at linux.com)
uses code from tview by Andrew Tridgell (tridge at linuxcare.com)
uses the zvt applet from gnome by Michael Zucchi (mzucchi at dehaa.sa.gov.au)
uses code from xmms (http://xmms.org/)
uses code from licq (http://licq.org/)
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