Monitoring Tools

There seems to be a collective effort from all distro manufacturers to hide operating complexities from a user. For a Windows user, Alt- Ctrl-Del is enough to have a birds eye view of what is occuring in the system. The task manager displays the status of the system resources and, besides presenting a list of running processes, also allows terminating them.

There is no equivalent of an easily accessible Task Manager in Linux. in OpenSuse for example, I have not come across a tool that lets me keep an eye on the Network data transfers. There is not even a system tray icon to show if the system is connected. There is a system monitor tool that can show the CPU and Memory stats; and getting to this tool requires advanced navigation skills. The alternative is to add a system monitor applet to the taskbar.
Adding an applet to the taskbar is an easy process, requiring a few clicks after accessing the context menu. It is the accessing of the context menu that can be a problem, especially if the taskbar is already full of windows. A few windows will have to be closed to allow the taskbar to show through.

Mandriva 2007 was the only distro that could also track Network usage. And this was quite endearing. The system tray displayed the network Icon and the monitor tool could be accessed from it's context menu. The system monitor applet which could be positioned on the taskbar itself was also configurable allowing the process chart's time axis to be increased allowing a longer term monitoring. Unfortunately, the Network chart (and probably the other charts too) had this annoying feature of automatically reconfiguring the axis limits without much ado. So it is possible that the actual difference is much more, but the graph line would show only a small variation since the chart axis would get reconfigured midway allowing the larger value to be plotted. This can be misleading. Fortunately, the Network monitor accessed from the system tray was more accurate.