GNOME Shell System Monitor Extension Gets A Preferences Dialog And Lots Of New Features

Since we last wrote about the GNOME Shell System Monitor extension, it got support for network upload / download rates and yesterday it also got a config dialog with lots of new features. Read on!

Using the latest GNOME Shell System Monitor extension from GIT, you can set the CPU, RAM, network or whatever to be hidden from the panel, but you can still see the values by clicking the extension icon / text on the panel:

But that's not all! You can now set the extension to display a graph on the panel thanks to a new Preferences dialog. From the preferences you can also enable/disable the text, extension icon, change the refresh time, graph width or colors, etc. Also, clicking any item in the System Monitor extension drop-down (I'm not sure how that's called) will open Gnome System Monitor.

Here's another screenshot in which I've set GNOME Shell System Monitor to display both a graph and text:

Install GNOME Shell System Monitor extension

For Arch Linux users, there's a package available in AUR: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=49250


For Ubuntu and Fedora, firstly install the dependencies:

- Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install python-gobject libgtop2-7 git-core

- Fedora:

sudo yum install pygobject2 libgtop2 git

Then, to set up the GNOME Shell System Monitor extension, run the commands below (for any GNOME Shell version 3.0 or 3.2):

rm -rf ~/git_projects #just in case
mkdir ~/git_projects && cd ~/git_projects
git clone git://github.com/paradoxxxzero/gnome-shell-system-monitor-applet.git

Only GNOME 3.0.x, now run the following commands:

cd gnome-shell-system-monitor-applet
git checkout gnome-3.0
cd -

Now again for any GNOME Shell version (3.0 or 3.2):

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions
cd ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions
ln -s ~/git_projects/gnome-shell-system-monitor-applet/system-monitor@paradoxxx.zero.gmail.com
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/share/glib-2.0/schemas
sudo cp ~/git_projects/gnome-shell-system-monitor-applet/org.gnome.shell.extensions.system-monitor.gschema.xml /usr/local/share/glib-2.0/schemas
sudo glib-compile-schemas /usr/local/share/glib-2.0/schemas
sudo cp ~/git_projects/gnome-shell-system-monitor-applet/system-monitor-applet-config.py /usr/local/bin/system-monitor-applet-config

And finally, reload GNOME Shell (ALT + F2 and enter "r" or log out and log back in).

Thanks to Casey J. Peter via WebUpd8 Facebook page for the tip!