Dynamic Desktop

[gte024h]

I have fiddled around with setting a screensaver as the desktop and such, but on my old beige G3, it's just not a good idea. A more useful thing I think would be to set a terminal or terminals as the desktop.

A common thing (for me) would be to display /var/log/system.log, or /var/log/httpd/error_log using the "tail -F" command.

I keep terminal windows open with these files all the time, but it would be so much more useful to have the text displayed in the background.

Perhaps there is a way to take the text from stdout in a terminal and display it as a screensaver? Then use the "screensaver as desktop" hack? I dunno... I do know that on a busy webserver it might make a fascinating screensaver to have the access or error logs scrolling by.

Just a simple idea for some System hacker or UNIX guru to think about :-)

[mervTormel]

well, there is aquamon...

http://nibs.arsware.org/AquaMon/

but nothing can beat going to shell and grokking for yourself, like a real Mon

[djn1]

I use Desktop Console (http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=11671&db=mac) to display the console.log and system.log on my desktop. It works well and doesn't take up many CPU cycles.

A free alternative (Desktop Console is $15) is Geek Tool (http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=17621&db=mac) though I don't like the fact that it doesn't allow you to customise the display font.

One or the other of these should allow you to do what you want.

[gte024h]

Desktop Console is exactly what I am looking for. Thanks so much for the excellent suggestion :-)