So, here's the situation:

On Windbringer, I habitually run LXDE as my desktop environment because it's lightweight and does what I need: It manages windows, gives me a menu, and stays out of my way so I can do interesting things.  For years I've been using a utility called GKrellm to implement not only system monitoring on my desktop (because I like to know what's going on), but to set and change my desktop background every 24 hours.  However, GKrellm has gotten somewhat long in the tooth and I've started using something different for realtime monitoring (but that's not the …

When you have a workstation running some variant of Linux, the Gnome desktop and you have an nVidia graphics card in the box, do yourself a favor and install their drivers. Make sure that the "Driver" line in /etc/X11/xorg.conf reads "nvidia" and not "nv". And when you get around to configuring multiple displays on the same system, don't mess with Gnome's System->Preferences->Display utility, use the nvidia-settings utility to do it for you (it'll ask for the root password).