desktop-tools

desktop-tools is a collection of tools to run my desktop that might be useful to other people as well:

• wmstatus does literally everything my dwm doesn’t but I’d like it to. It includes PulseAudio volume management and hand-written NUT and MPD clients, all in the name of liberation from GPL-licensed software of course.

• brightness allows me to change the brightness of w/e display device I have.

• input-switch likewise switches the input source of external displays.

• fancontrol-ng is a clone of fancontrol that can handle errors on resume from suspend instead of setting fans to maximum speed and quitting; in general it doesn’t handle everything the original does

• shellify is a simple script that sets up a shell for commands like vgdb and nmcli that are painfully lacking it

• gdm-switch-user tells the running GDM daemon, if any, to show the switch user screen

• siprandom uses the SipHash 2-4 algorithm to produce a stream of pseudo-random data; it should be fast enough to saturate most devices

• big-brother tracks the title of the active window and the idle state of the user and writes these events to standard output.

Don’t expect them to work under any OS that isn’t Linux.

Packages

Regular releases are sporadic. git master should be stable enough. You can get a package with the latest development version from Archlinux’s AUR, or from openSUSE Build Service for the rest of mainstream distributions. Consult the list of repositories and their respective links at:

https://build.opensuse.org/project/repositories/home:pjanouch:git

Building

Build dependencies: CMake, pkg-config, liberty (included)
Runtime dependencies: libpulse, libx11, libgdm (optional)

$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/pjanouch/desktop-tools.git
$ mkdir desktop-tools/build
$ cd desktop-tools/build
$ cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug
$ make

To install the applications, you can do either the usual:

# make install

Or you can try telling CMake to make a package for you. For Debian it is:

$ cpack -G DEB
# dpkg -i desktop-tools-*.deb

Contributing and Support

Use this project’s GitHub to report any bugs, request features, or submit pull requests. If you want to discuss this project, or maybe just hang out with the developer, feel free to join me at irc://irc.janouch.name, channel #dev.

License

desktop-tools is written by Přemysl Janouch <p.janouch@gmail.com>.

You may use the software under the terms of the ISC license, the text of which is included within the package, or, at your option, you may relicense the work under the MIT or the Modified BSD License, as listed at the following site:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html