system monitor
 

I would like a system monitor like gkrellm, except I would like it to just be text based and shown on my desktop. Looking kind of like root-tail does with log files. Top isn't really adequate, as it takes up too much space and I just want to see stuff like CPU, memory, network usage, and not a process list. I've seen something that does this before in screenshots, but never found out what it is. Thanks in advance.

I don't know of any of the top of my head but you could use something like this:
while [ 1 ];do top -n1 | head -n7 > /tmp/monitor;sensors >> /tmp/monitor;clear;cat /tmp/monitor;sleep 1;done

use it with a option with top i think