Root-Portal is a GNOME tool that tracks modifications to files and processes, providing real-time feedback.
Root Portal runs silently in the background, making it a great tool for monitoring various system logs, including /var/log/messages, /var/log/xferlog, /var/log/httpd/access_log, and more. The program allows users to have as many "portals" of text on the screen as they want, in varying sizes and colors, with practically any other property they care to think of. The text portals are translucent, meaning that users can still see their desktop background picture beneath the text.
The roottext module lets users run programs such as xsnow while ensuring that snowflakes pass through the text without disappearing. The gnometext module allows users to shade the background and put alternate images as backgrounds for their portals. Although programs like xsnow cannot mix their graphics with this, users can still shade these custom backgrounds. The only disadvantage to using the system is that programs such as xsnow cannot mix their graphics with other backgrounds.
Root-Portal is designed to handle non-fixed sized fonts with ease, making the program particularly versatile. However, the GNOME module that Root-Portal uses, zvt, currently does not work well with non-fixed sized fonts. The authors of Root-Portal are hoping that the author of zvt will address this issue in later releases of their library.
In addition to file tailing facility to monitor log files, Root-Portal features a loading monitor that shows users when a new process has been created and when a process has been destroyed.
Root-Portal is an anti-paranoia program for people who sit at their desktops and wonder who is doing what from the outside, what is running on their system, and why their hard disk is suddenly ticking over for no reason.
To run Root-Portal, users need to have GTK+, GNOME, ZVT (usually comes with GNOME), GNOME-XML (which autoconf may not check), and libstdc++ installed. Users must also have version 1.x of the program (as version 2.x is not supported at present).
Version 0.5.2: N/A