Gnome Shell system monitor extension
Here’s yet another very useful GNOME Shell extension which serves as a replacement for an old Gnome Panel applet: “Gnome Shell System Monitor Applet”.
“Gnome Shell System Monitor” extension displays the RAM, swap and CPU usage on the Gnome Shell top bar (apparently that’s how it’s called although I tend to call it the ‘top panel’). The values are displayed in percentages but when clicked, you can see the actual values and you can also turn off/on the items that are displayed on the top bar:
Gnome Shell system monitor

The extension is a bit more difficult to install then most other GNOME Shell extensions. If you’ve installed GNOME 3 in Ubuntu from a PPA, use Arch Linux or Fedora 15, all you have to do is copy/paste the commands below – but please note that I’ve only tested it in Fedora 15 (firstly install git-core):
mkdir ~/git_projects
cd ~/git_projects
git clone git://github.com/paradoxxxzero/gnome-shell-system-monitor-applet.git
mkdir -p ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions
cd ~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions
ln -s ~/git_projects/gnome-shell-system-monitor-applet/system-monitor@paradoxxx.zero.gmail.com
sudo cp ~/git_projects/gnome-shell-system-monitor-applet/org.gnome.shell.extensions.system-monitor.gschema.xml /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas
cd /usr/share/glib-2.0/schemas
sudo glib-compile-schemas .

However, if you’ve compiled Gnome Shell using jhbuild, those instructions won’t work. I’ve tried replacing the paths with my jhbuild install (you must copy the schema to ~/gnome-shell/install/share/glib-2.0/schemas) but it didn’t work for me, at least not with the latest GNOME Shell from GIT so if you find a way to get this to work with Gnome Shell compiled with jhbuild, let us know how you’ve done it in the comments!

Thanks to Florian for the tip!



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