I am looking for a few specific items to run permanently on my desktop. Obviously as they are to form part of the desktop they mus have minimal borders and be transparent. (I can cope if neither of these options can be met, however it would look so much better if they were).

Firstly I want to split the desktop horizontally, either 50:50 or 60:40 top:bottom. In the top half should be a file/web browser, defaulting to my home diretory upon login. The bottom half should be a shell.

To the right of these two panes are some optional, but nice features I would like to see. Running top tobottom we have The current Weather (and possible forecast) and the current moon phase and sun/moon rise/set times). Next we have a clock and calender. Clock being either analogue or digital, calendar showing the entire month. Under this we have the system monitor panel. Ideally this will show bandwidth for networking, fixed and removable media, RAM and CPU usage etc.

If all the above is possible (if any of it is) I would appreciate some pointers of where to look for the software. My main whant is the filemanager/shell view.


Also I would be interested in what you think are the best session and windowmanagers to use to login and display all this.

NB: I will be looking to implement this on Debian 3.2 with the latest version of X.org, probably ported from Ubuntu, ut built from source if required.


Many thanks

For the desktop apps like clocks and weather and system monitors you might be interested in adesklets. Very cool and very customizable.

-geomatt

Well, if you're using kde, you can achieve that file manager/shell view with window-specific settings (press alt+f3 in any open window, go to advanced -> special window settings). You can force the location+size of the window to how you want it. For the weather forecast/clock/etc look into karamba ( kde equivalent of gdesklets).

many thanks, I will look into that.

But what say if I wanted to use something other than KDE/Gnome. Is there anything available?

For the split-screen part of your wishes, you may want to take a look at the Ion window manager (unfortunately, default key bindings are awful).

Yves.