Monitor your system with gnome shell extensions

The extensions for the awesome desktop is coming like anything. There are new extensions coming in by the day and you could get most of the ‘lost’ panel applet functionalities back in gnome 3.2 already. Most of these extensions are in their very early development stage. So, you might find some of them ‘rough on the edge’. Today I will show you two extensions to monitor your system.

The first one if the system monitor extension. Aptly named with nice functionalities and options already included. The extension will add the memory, cpu, swap and network usage information into the main panel of gnome shell.

You could enable or disable to display the information in the panel or not (that is to show information just in the menu).

You can download the extension from here. To install first you need to copy the ‘system-monitor@paradoxxx.zero.gmail.com’ directory into usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions and then copy the ‘org.gnome.shell.extensions.system-monitor.gschema.xml’ file to the ‘/usr/local/share/glib-2.0/schemas’ directory.

(Create if you don’t have one: type the following in terminal)

sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/share/glib-2.0/schemas

After copying the file, type this in the terminal

cd /usr/local/share/glib-2.0/schemas
sudo glib-compile-schemas . (there is a dot at the end)

Now restart the gnome shell

The second extension is the temperature extension that will monitor the cpu temperature and add the information into the panel. You need to download (get the extension from here) and copy the extension folder into your usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions and restart your shell.

As I said in the beginning, these extensions are in the early stages of development. It makes more sense if both these extensions are clubbed together to make a single extension.