Multiload-ng 1.4.0

Changelog

• Support for Ubuntu Unity and others (AppIndicator plugin)
• Support for System tray
• Package generators for most Linux distros
• Ability to switch between SI units (base 1000) and IEC units (base 1024) to measure bytes
• Drop shared component of Memory graph
• Ability to choose between two methods of counting used memory
• Command line options parsing
• Simulate panel orientation on standalone, based on width-to-height ratio
• Ability to import color schemes created with older versions of Multiload-ng
• Ability to choose background gradient direction
• Better graphs drawing performance
• Better portability of build scripts
• Other minor improvements

Bugfixes

• Fixed: preferences window crashed when running with older GTK+3 versions (<3.16)
• Fixed: graphs drawed a line over the border when the autoscaler maximum was 0 (empty data for long time)
• Fixed: parametric command tester reported empty command lines as invalid
• Fixed: Memory simple tooltip reported used+cached RAM instead of just used RAM
• Other minor fixes

Special thanks

Thanks to Alexander and @Photon89 for their useful suggestions and exhaustive beta tests

Release notes

New plugins

There are two new plugins: system tray and indicator. Because of them making use of advanced GTK features, minimum required GTK+2 version raises to 2.20. GTK+3 can still be any version since 3.0.0.

System tray plugin allows Multiload-ng to be embedded in virtually any panel, as long as it has a system tray. It has less options than other variants of Multiload-ng, because of tray icons limitations. That aside, is a perfectly working implementation.

Indicator plugin adds support to Ubuntu Unity among others. Broadly speaking, this plugin can be embedded within any panel with libappindicator support (I'm not sure, but this should include KDE too).

Improvements to Memory graph

This release brings two major changes to Memory graph.

The first is that, after doing some research, shared memory count was removed from Multiload-ng. This is the approach followed by many resources monitor.
Why? Because it's misleading and confusing. Most of shared memory is also included in cached memory, and this caused over 100% memory usage in some situations due to double counting the memory. This was very noticeable when storing large files in tmpfs mounts.
A graph where all components are required to be disjoint sets is simply not the place for shared memory count. As result of removing shared memory, now the graph reports correct memory usage percentages.

The second change is the introduction of the ability to choose between two methods of counting used memory, depending on where Slab cache should be counted:

• count it in cache (previous behavior): tools like free and top do that.
• count it in used: tools like htop and some graphical system monitors do that.

Choosing one method or another is a matter of habit. As you can see if you try it, the total amount of memory does not change. You can use this preference to align memory values with those of your favorite tool.

Gradient background

This release introduces the ability to change the direction of background gradient, individually, for each graph. There are 8 possible linear directions (one every 45 degrees), and one radial direction (from center outwards)

Package generators

This release includes in the source package generators for several Linux distributions:

• ebuild (Gentoo, and derivatives)
• PKGBUILD (Arch and derivatives)
• deb (Debian and derivatives, Ubuntu and derivatives, Linux Mint, and others)
• RPM (Red Hat Linux, Fedora, Mandriva, SuSe, OpenSUSE, PCLinuxOS, Mageia, and others)
• Slackware

Take a look at extras directory and its README.

Command line options parsing

Plugins that are also individual applications (namely: standalone, indicator. systray) now accept also simple command line options, for example to open Preferences window on application startup.
Run application in a terminal with --help argument to get the full list of supported arguments.