The top bar in a classic gnome desktop shows menus (top left), then some freely configurable panel space, and on the top right a somewhat configurable panel space with system status icons, date/time, username and such.
With big monitors today, the top bar is wide enough to show a lot of empty space. Since this bar also is tall enough to host text, I would like to make use of that space to show some more status information.
Particularly I'm looking for a way to
- Repeatedly run arbitrary shell commands, e.g.
date '+%Y%m%d-%H%M%S'bjobs | wc -l- etc.
- Display the output of those in the top menu bar
A solution might be to write a custom gnome applet that does not use a static icon to represent itself, but does the above. Then I could attach that applet to a panel in the top bar.
Is there a quicker way?
Quicker for me would be e.g. to put the shell commands in a script, then create a named pipe, and feed that pipe into some gnome config file(s).
Any ideas?
Note that I am not root on the machine. If the only solution requires me to install things, I'd encourage you to still post it here. Maybe I can influence the sysadmin, or work around in other ways.
