Some time ago, I spent a fair amount of time surfing through the various desktop theme sites, just aimlessly browsing through screenshots. In a short time, I noticed an odd trend: in the majority of the shots, some variation of GKrellM was running. I thought that was interesting, but didn’t pay it much mind. But then I started seeing it running alongside various packages in screenshots for other programs and projects.

For those not familiar with GKrellM, it’s a graphical system monitor that runs on GTK (which is the G in GKrellM, incidentally - the rest being Krell, a visual measurement marker, and M for Monitor). This handy tool runs on your desktop and dispays graphs for everything from CPU load and memory use to ethernet activity and new mail notification. It’s themeable, and the multitude of plugins make it do just about everything you could need.

What’s more, it has most of the tools one may need right out of the box. I downloaded it and after a simple make and make install (no ./configure needed), I ran the program and bam, I had a good view of what was happening on my system.

Sure, top, ps, free, uptime, du, and df can all give me all the detail I need, but there are two problems with that: 1) none provide an at-a-glance view, much less all at once; 2) they’re just plain not as snazzy.

If you’re seeing peculiar behavior on your system and wondering if you’ve got a bottleneck in CPU load or memory capacity (as I was), download GKrellM and find out.