Nall

Nall is a GTK tool that discreetly fits into your freedesktop system tray, with the purpose of periodically spawning every kind of script and displaying a one-line output in the tooltip window. This makes it ideal for monitoring or notifying almost anything, depending on your imagination and ability to script.

I decided to give Nall a try because I wanted a simple way to notify myself about networked drives, check my emails, and know the title of the music I was listening to on my last.fm radio. Nall's generality also allows you to use Nagios Plugins to monitor various resources. It is compatible with any POSIX operating system that has a freedesktop aware trayer.

Installation and usage is easy. You just need to install a C compiler, make utility, and the development files of libgtk+2.0 and libglib-2.0 provided by your distribution. Then, unzip the archive, go to the nall-2008.../ directory, and run make. After that, execute ./nall&.

For those using Debian based distros, the following commands will do the trick: sudo apt-get install build-essential libgtk2.0-dev libglib2.0-dev tar -xf nall-20081015.tar cd nall-20081015 make && ./nall&.

Note that nall won't run alone, so you must provide some scripts in the ~/.nall directory. Each nall script should be named with the following scheme: Ntitle, where N is the desired scheduling frequency in seconds (e.g: 3) and title is the title displayed on the left-side of the tooltip window (e.g: email).

The script output may not contain any carriage return, and nall doesn't care about the script return value, only the output is scanned. Here's an example script:

ls ~/.nall
10ping
[email protected]
5shell-fm

cat ~/.nall/[email protected]

#!/bin/sh
{
echo X login brouits
XXpassXX
sleep 1
echo X select inbox
sleep 1
echo X logout
} | telnet imap.free.fr 143 2>/dev/null | grep RECENT | tail -1.

Overall, Nall is a versatile tool with endless potential for monitoring and notifications, which can be easily customized through scripting.