Application icons, Dialup Applets and an Off-Topic Rant ;-)

[Peter Garrett]

On Sun, 22 May 2005 08:24:02 +0930
squareyes <squareyes at optusnet.com.au> wrote:

> david wrote:
> 
> >On Sat, 2005-05-21 at 15:48 +0930, squareyes wrote:
> >  
> >
> >If you run the following command
> >
> >killall gnome-panel
> >
> >you'll find the icons appear.
> >
> >nux
> >
> >
> >  
> >
> Thanks for that nux,
> worked fine.
> Next question,
> Is there a utility that will keep track of my
> internet connection time?
> With Warty I used "Modem Lights",
> have added the "Modem Monitor" applet
> to panel, but it will only show
> "Connection active, but could not get connection time".
> Thanks in advance.
> Take Care
> Winton

Hi Winton,

This might not be quite what you're looking for, but the GKrellM monitoring gizmo has a ppp connection timer built in . You can apt-get install gkrellm, of course. It does a lot of other things and has many plugins available, but I guess it's sort of "eye candy for the geek" ;-) The default skin is kind of ugly, but there are lots of other skins available.

I would imagine some of the Window-Maker dock apps do something like what you want, too.

Personally I find the dialup tools, including the graphical config tools, in Hoary, leave a lot to be desired. I hope some attention will be given to them. I used the pppconfig command line utility, but few people new to Linux or indeed without a Debian background would even know it exists!

For some reason the graphical tool gave me a *very* slow connection ( 4MB download in one hour, anyone?). I fired up pppconfig to reconfigure the connection, and everything went back to normal... But of course the applet doesn't work with pppconfig, and the graphical tool still reports that ppp is not configured...

Sorry for the off-topic rant ;-)

Peter