This is the Analogue Machine Theme Collection for Superkaramba
by KiTaSuMbA

About the project:
------------------

I always liked metallic and/or old machinery looks on anything that is themable... 
When I saw the TubeClock theme, I was thrilled... But nothing else had a similar look to combine!
First came the CPU and RAM modules as complete and total rip-offs from that code and grafics. 
Isn't that the beauty of GPL? ;-)
But then I had this crazy idea about diskspace: just a dial with df's free-space isn't very helpful.
A "progressbar - like" meter is nowhere near that oldish, so... what about a VU-meter kind of thing?
But how do you move a needle on an analog panel? Good ol' GPL to the rescue again! Downloaded analogclock
and broke it to pieces, so the discVU theme is actually a _dual_ rip-off!

ADDITION: 
NetVU after some personal thought and some requests is now available! This is not a real VU though... The range of possible network traffic values even on the same computer is extremely large. Even a logarithmic equation describing the needle's movement (the inverse, more or less, of the DiscVU case) could leave many uncovered areas. I chose the solution on many older analog V/I/R polymeters used in electronic labs: short range linear needle and a scale indicator. This way, NetVU covers with the same detail cases of 1-15kb/s, great for a dial-up ppp0, or even up to the dizzyngly extreme of 150Mb/s that even a gigabit ethernet will not saturate.

Usage and limitations:
----------------------

These themes run seamlessly on my athlon-xp box with a 2.6 kernel. Unfortunately, you may need to change
a few things but I'm nowhere as good with python as to provide you some on-the-fly configuration menus.
You'll have to edit the scripts yourselves, sorry!

-TubeCPU: gets its info from /proc/stat, so in case you have an SMP box and want single CPU monitors or you want
to have separate nice/user/sys dials, feedle with the code. In SMP machines /proc/stat's first line is cumulative,
then come specific cpu (0,1,etc.) lines.

-TubeRAM: most (all?) karamba themes I've seen so far point to the "nominal" free ram available on a box. In a modern
desktop this is far from painting the real picture as you can easily eat-up even 1G in cache which is still available though, should the system need it. Therefore I point to "free - cache", i.e. the 2nd line of the free command's output. The 3-digit dial allows up to 999MB of free RAM. If you have more FREE ram, you'll have to modify both the script and, heavily, the image. Tip: grab TubeClock's one! It should be easier to translocate those 2 points rather than add another tube position in mine.

-DiscVU: One absolutelly necessary editing point is the targeted partition. Now, I know this sucks but if you think you can add a configuration menu to change targets be my guest. Scroll down the code, you will find a shell command execution: "df |  grep \"/hdc2\""  (hdc2 is my /home partition). Change that value to reflect the partition you wish to monitor. There is a maximum-free hard limit similar to TubeRAM here too: you might only have 99Gb and 990Mb of free space on a single partition. Hopefully this is a lot more far-fetched than the previous condition.

-NetVU: netVU has 2 configuration points clearly stated on top of the script. The first is the target interface (i.e. eth0, eth1, ppp0). The second is the interval of time that the theme updates itself, currently using a default of 5 secs. Note that you should change that both in the .py script (variable INTV) and the .theme file. If you wish to have multiple dials for multiple interfaces, just copy the theme folder over, change each .py script's target and rename both .py and .theme accordingly (i.e. NetVU_eth0.py, NetVU_eth0.theme and NetVU_ppp0.py, NetVU_ppp0.theme). The same is of course true for all karamba themes, TubeCPU and DiskVU included. 

Probably Frequently Asked Questions:
-----------------------------------  

Q: Why didn't you create a single theme but a collection of monitors?
A: Because modular means flexible both on what you load _and_ where. Suppose you want to make a custom desktop wallpaper... Wouldn't it be cool to create special "slots" to bolt-in these monitors? Or perhaps you just hate the DiscVU...

Q: Something's funny about the DiscVU's analog scale...
A: Yeap! The scale is increasing on higher values of disk usage. That's why you find 25% almost stuck next to 0 and 75% is half-way the range. Actuals VU do work that way but there is more than simple look-alike needs to determine this: wether you have 25% or 30% of a disk free makes no big difference in modern times and capacities, but when you get close to 95-96% even a 1% difference is crucial to, say, ripping a DVD or installing OpenOffice from sources.

Q: You make such a fuss about GPL and ripping-off code from other themes. Why?
A: Because I have close-to-zero python knowledge and wasn't it for the public licenses you could never enjoy this
fine piece of software (J/K :P)

Q: What software did you use to make this piece of junk?
A: Gimp-2.0-pre3 for the graphics, kwrite to write, eh...ok, mostly copy-paste the code and kcalc to help me calculate that VU-needle equation (it cost me a night to find anything useful).


Acknowlegdements:
-----------------
A great thank you to the karamba developers for giving us another reason to lose time in front of a computer.
Thanks to the people releasing their themes and projects to kde-look or any other public site so that we can admire, use and abuse them.
Thanks to a bunch of friends for helping out on a few tough points in python coding...



License:
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This is released under - what else? - the GPL v.2



