World’s biggest system monitor?
16 Jul 2004My current project (as of a few days ago, nothing long term ;)) is getting a working phpSysInfo page with trippy temperature monitoring and other such kah-razy features.
So, I grabbed the latest from the SF CVS server (2.3-cvs) and installed it, because my old version (2.2-release) has some serious issues with SuSE’s way of doing things – it “worked”, sans Memory Usage and missing much of the Hardware Information. Not that that is really relevant anyway, seeing I (of course!) wanted to try out the latest.
I’m not sure if 2.2 supported the trippy hardware monitoring thing, but even if it did, I’m over it already ;) 2.3 has a nicer version number :p
Yeah. So. Hardware monitoring. I downloaded a few (it supports 4 different backend programs) and tried to compile – xmbmon downloaded and compiled fine (well, okay – mbmon compiled fine, the x extension didn’t… not that it matters, because for my purposes I only want the CLI version)… except it’ll fail except when run as root. It’s a documented problem, although the only reference to it was in relation to *BSD systems, and the fix refers to some kernel-related file which apparently doesn’t exist.
So I gave up on that… it was probably a surmountable problem, but still, other peoples code scares me off. Moving on to the next (non-BSD-only) option!
LM Sensors… hey, that’s okay. Relies on kernel hooks, which prior to 2.6 kernels involved rolling your own with an i2c extension compiled in. I am, for the first time, as greatful as I should be for SuSE’s lean towards the cutting-edge! Hmm. That said, LM Sensors apparently won’t compile without kernel source.
So. I want to install a 780KB app, and wind up downloading ~700MB of stuff! Hmm. This works, really it does. Kernel sources are only ~180MB (at least, the SuSE respiritory RPM’s are that big… last time I checked the size of the kernel (admittedly, that was back when 2.4 was the new thing), it was about 60MB!), but I got distracted in package-selection, and saw that a newer version of Opera was available, so I grabbed that.
Apparently the old version of Opera had no problems at all without a certain dependency, but this latest one requires Eclipse… a ~170MB Java library thingo. At least, I think that’s what it was… OSS is way too trusting with dependencies! Hehe.
So after having downloaded all that, I’m thinking the compile still isn’t going to work! Doh!
Ah well. phpSysInfo is still cool ;)