I’ve been working on my little wallpaper management bash shell script that handles changing wallpapers on my desktop. The image to the right shows the system information that is displayed down the right edge of my screen. From the top you have:

Click for larger view

• Local weather forecast for the next four days.
• The current and next calendar months.
• List of the last twelve incoming phone calls.
• Various system info such as cpu usage, disk space and top five processes.

(The image contains bogus phone numbers, don’t bother trying to ring ‘em.)

Ever since I upgraded my desktop to two monitors this background information has been a lot more visible off to the side, and so I decided to give it a bit of an update.

Originally I was using conky to display all that information, but all the info aside from the system info is fairly static, and could easily be updated when the wallpaper changes every five minutes, instead of being a set of conky processes, so I’ve been playing a lot with ImageMagick and sharpening up my bash scripting skills to actually write the information onto the wallpaper image. So far I have the phone log and calendar being written, and plan to do the weather forecast next, so then I will only be running one conky process.

If you are trying to install or upgrade Adobe Air under Linux and you get a (unhelpful) error message saying it couldn’t perform the operation, try it again after ensuring that Firefox is not running.

Found after a recent update that I wasn’t getting audio anymore when viewing Flash content under linux (openSUSE 11.1 in this case). I’ve also been having a love/hate relationship with sound working with Adobe Air.

After a bit of a hunt around I found comment that it appears PulseAudio was the culprit. Read more »