how do i display text on my gnome desktop?

alex.blackbit · Advocate Joined: 26 Jul 2005 Posts: 2397

i tried with x11-misc/xrootconsole and x11-terms/root-tail, nothing was displayed, no error messages, nothing in the logs.

yabbadabbadont · Posted: Thu May 21, 2009 6:06 pm Post subject:

Those most likely won't work as long as nautilus is drawing the desktop (which it is by default). You can either edit your gconf settings to stop nautilus/gnome from handling the desktop (in which case you will need to set the wallpaper using some other method), or you can try to find a gdesklet/screenlet/some other desktop widget that provides the same functionality.
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GoingDown · Posted: Thu May 21, 2009 6:29 pm Post subject:

You could try to send system notifications via notify-send?
Notifications will appear next to your system status bar.

Another option is to use zenity to show dialog with text.

megaflow · n00b Joined: 11 Mar 2005 Posts: 60 Location: Maasmechelen

conky ?

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/conky-howto.xml
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Dell System XPS L702X/0XN71K,Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2720QM

alex.blackbit · Advocate Joined: 26 Jul 2005 Posts: 2397

GoingDown:
thanks for your answer, but i want to display larger amounts of text, e.g. the system logs, so notify-send and zenity are noy suitable.

megaflow:
see above. thanks anyway.
i guess conky would work somehow, but it flickered everytime i tried it. and i don't know if it has auto-update capabilities (tail -f).

yabbadabbadont:
thanks for the info. i did not know that nautilus controls the background in a way that prohibits painting stuff there.
i took a quick look at the available desklets in portage, the overlays and gdesklets.de but did not find anything suitable.

RedSquirrel · Guru Joined: 22 Apr 2008 Posts: 336

conky has 'tail logfile #', which shows the last # lines of the logfile.

As for the flickering, have you tried the tips in the conky FAQ? (It's #3.)

If you were only going to show one system log, a transparent terminal with no border/decorations and sticky (showing on all desktops/workspaces) might be an idea.

Naib · Posted: Thu May 21, 2009 10:45 pm Post subject:

two ways

1) Via Conky -to show stats and all
2) Devispie - to modify certain applications/or instances of applications
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alex.blackbit · Advocate Joined: 26 Jul 2005 Posts: 2397

RedSquirrel:
of course i tried the doublebuffer option. it helps against the flickering, but it makes all the icons on my desktop disappear, which makes it unusable.
the ownwindow option does not bring such problems, but i do not want the text to be in a window, but on to be "just there".

Naib:
how do you use Devispie to achieve what i want?

Hibbelharry · Posted: Sun May 24, 2009 12:06 pm Post subject:

I think Nautilus has an Option to not draw the desktop. I think it's --no-desktop. Doing this you will get rid of Nautilus drawing on top of the root Window but you will also loose the ability to get desktop icons displayed.

cwr · Veteran Joined: 17 Dec 2005 Posts: 1969