Announcing SysMonster
Since the release of Ubuntu 11.04 (aka Natty Narwhal) there was no place left for panel applets anymore. Which is of course a nice thing, because what replaces them (indicators) are much better.
But with every change also comes the usual disruption: there were applets that I was using back before Natty that are now blacklisted, and there are no indicators (yet) with the same functionality to replace them. System Monitor Applet is one of the ones I miss. It is probably because of my OCD tendencies that I need to see what’s going on in my system at any given time. Other solutions like Conky are just not for me. I like to use my computer with most of the windows maximized so I rarely see the desktop, and Conky uses the desktop to draw itself on.
I could live without System Monitor Applet in the panel up until now. But I was starting to miss it so badly, that despite myself never really touching Python for anything useful I started to dig on the Internet for ways of doing this and that with this beautiful language, and the result is: SysMonster.
SysMonster is a system monitor indicator aiming to provide the same (or very similar) functionality as System Monitor Applet did. Overall it was a nice experience writing this little piece of software. Python is nice, very nice, the functionality of Sysmonster isn’t extraordinary so I tackled along just fine. One thing that somewhat disappointed me is documentation, or lack thereof. It either does not exist, or is outdated, poorly organized, lacking in detail, lacking examples, or any combination of the above.
Anyways, I finally managed to put everything together and also to “debianize” the source code. Thanks to Launchpad there is now a PPA from where you can install and try out SysMonster. Hopefully some of you will find it useful. To install do this :
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:boteeka/sandbox sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install sysmonster
Suggestions and help for further advancements are welcome 
