Some extensive system health monitoring

[John Richard Moser]

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Jay Camp wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-03-07 at 23:10 -0500, John Richard Moser wrote:
> 
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>>So I was considering the smartmon thread about making an icon to
>>indicate health, and system recovery tools, and whatnot, and came up
>>with a bigger idea than just "Your hard drive will fail soon."
>>Potentially, "You need more CPU," "Memory is low," "Security regressions
>>detected," "Users passwords cracked," etc.
> 
> 
> A while back I saw some work (or perhaps they were just prototypes) that
> some GNOME people were doing for notifications.  They were sort of
> similar to the Windows XP-style notifications.  Those are sometimes
> annoying, so something like this would have to be done _right_ and not
> abused (no I do not want to clean up my Desktop, go away!).
> 

Red Hat (as much as I hate them) did it right.  Generally Red Hat is a
good thing to mimic for UI intrinsics, TO A DEGREE.  I found Fedora to
be very friendly to root log-in at X as an administration console;
Ubuntu has the right idea, gksu all over the damn place.

What happens in fedora is an icon appers green (with a check) when
there's no updates, and turns red and pulses (i.e. slowly transitions
smoothly so as not to draw demanding attention) when there's updates.
This lets you see that the system is up to date at a glance, and that
new updates are available at a glance; but notably does not forcibly and
unignorably drag your attention to it until you do something about it.

Similarly any such notifications should function the same way, offering
information when the mouse is hovered over the icon and NOT popping up
messages in the middle of the screen or as balloons.  If multiple
warnings are about, a click should bring up a context menu of choices.

I'm not a UI design expert, take my advice with a grain of salt.

> Does anybody know what I'm talking about?  I can't recall any
> specifics. :(
> 
> ...
> 
> 
>> A CPU analyzer to notice when X11 apps (which
>>should be interactive realtime tasks) are spending way too much time
>>cranking 100% CPU could suggest a faster CPU
> 
> 
> Or the program is hung ;).  Wouldn't be good to tell them to buy a
> faster CPU when there is a bug.
> 

That could be noticed, though I don't know how.  An exception list maybe.

> 

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