I'm having a problem with root-tail working under KDE3 in a freshly installed version of Redhat 8.0.

I installed the rpm version I could find from rpmfind.net and it seemed to compile fine. I'm running it from root given the suggested command of: root-tail -g 80x25+100+50 -shade /var/log/messages,green /var/log/secure,red,'ALERT'

Its listed in the process list and doesnt seem to be zombied although I have to kill -9 it to close it down but it just doesnt show up on the desktop as its supposed to.

I downloaded the latest version from: www.goof.com/pcg/marc/root-tail.html who is now maintaining root-tail but Redhat 8.0 doesnt seem to ship with xmkmf which is needed to create the Makefile from the Imakefile that comes with the tar.gz from the above link.

a quick search for xmkmf on findrpm didnt turn out anything worth a shit... neither did a search on freshmeat.net

Does anyone know how to fix this little problem or of a fix not made available on the maintainers site?

Thanks,
Koiphish

A follow up to my problem:

Marc Lehmann, the maintainer of the root-tail project emailed me and told me why I was having trouble.

The xmkmf problem is due to XFree86... i need to compile the developement version.

But the problem with root-tail I have is actually just KDE.

This was his response:

"kde opens a window in front of the root-window, so what looks like the desktop background is, in fact, just another kde window.

so no program using the root window works under kde."

That kinda sucks... anyone wanna try their hand at reverse engineering root-tail to work with kde's second non-root-window? Could be called Kroot-tail... heh

ha ha ha, hey thanks for the info, I run Flux, but that's still good info.

Have you checked out some of the root-tail clones out there? Maybe one'll work for your purposes?

http://freshmeat.net/search/?q=root-...ction=projects

Cool