Re: [gnome-love] Intrested in hacking gnome and doing gtop tree

[Sebastian Kapp <lasheimok web de>]

On 08 Jun 2001 15:15:17 -0400, Mike Borrelli wrote:
> Hey,
>
> Sorry for this pseudo-'me too' response.  I just had a thought about it 
> and hoped it might be of some use.
>
> Lots of people complain that Linux isn't user friendly enough.  It's 
> getting better and I'm sure that one day our grandparents are going to be 
> building rpms and such, but anyway.  On to my idea how to help it get that 
> way.
>
> This applet seems like a really neat idea, but what would be cool (and 
> shouldn't be too difficult to add on to what you propsed already) is a 
> 'list' of programs that are system in nature, ie, /usr/X11R6/X, etc.  If 
> the util had this, along with some other options, it would be really neat 
> for a newbie.  The idea is that if the program drawing the CPU time is a 
> 'critical' or 'system' task, don't show the user if it's in beginer mode, 
> for example.  This way, if for some reason, X was the culprit and some Joe 
> Schmow saw this, he might not know that X is required for GNOME to run, so 
> he'd happily kill it and wonder why everything went away.
>
> I'm not sure how much configurablity it should have, but it would be neat 
> to have programs (with regular expression matching), users, and a 'skill 
> level'.  If it's set to beginer it only shows their own tasks that run 
> away.  Intermediate would show their own and system tasks with a warning, 
> and Expert would just show the task without using any of the filters.
>
> Good?  Awful?
>
> Regards,
> Mike
>
> On Fri Jun  8 16:11:13 2001 Sebastian Kapp said...
> > On 05 Jun 2001 12:25:18 +1200, Luke Hutchison wrote:
> > > Kevin Vandersloot wrote:
> > > >  I agree that simplicity would be key here. After all I basically use
> > > > gtop to see which process is consuming 99% cpu and kill it.
> > >
> > > KDE actually has a little applet now which notifies you if there is a
> > > program consuming excess resources (e.g. 99% CPU) for an extended period of
> > > time, and asks you if you want to kill it or not (it also tells you though
> > > that it might be performing a useful function).  Something like this could
> > > be quite handy as an option, although I know most current Unix users
> > > wouldn't use it.
> >
> > I like the idea, so I wrote a little applet that does exactly that.
> > Well, trys to do, at least. I've got two problems:
> >
> > 1. I used the automake stuff generated by Anjuta, but that doesn't
> > support applets yet, so I can't compile the applet. Can someone give me
> > a hint how I have to change automake.am to make it support applets?
> >
> > In the applets docs is an example of a Makefile, it goes something like
> > this:
> >
> > FIXME, I need a newer example.
> >
> > But that automake stuff isn't mentioned at all.
> >
> > 2. I scanned gtop for hours, but I just couldn't figure out how to use
> > libgtop. Can someone give me an example how to get the cpu percent of
> > each process? Every other information seemed to be easily available, but
> > I couldn't find that particular one.
> >
> >
> > So, currently, I've just implemented the GUI, but couldn't even test it.
> > Well, every help is appreciated...


I like the idea, but there might be an easier way. Instead of having a
list of needed applications, in the applet there's the option to only
care about own processes. Unless you're root, you can't kill other
processes anyway.

BTW, I still don't know how to compile that thing. Can someone be so
kind and answer that part of my mail?