On Ubuntu Gutsy, the embedded terminal plugin for gedit didn’t seem to work for me. It may not work for you, either. If it doesn’t, you can fix it with the following steps:

1. At the terminal, type: sudo gedit /usr/lib/gedit-2/plugins/terminal.py

2. Find the line that says:

   self._vte.fork_command()
    

   It should be around line 95.

3. Replace the line with:

   shell = os.getenv("SHELL")
   self._vte.fork_command(shell, argv = [shell], directory = os.getcwd())
    

4. Save and quit. When you next start up gedit, the embedded terminal should work.

I’ve recently been playing around with wmii, a very minimal window manager for Linux. It uses a virtual filesystem to allow third party scripts to interact with it, in the style of procfs or Plan 9. ruby-wmii is just such a system for Ruby, and I’ve been spending an interesting time trying it out.

I’m not sure whether I like wmii yet, but I’m willing to give it a chance. It’s very minimal, but it’s nice to be able to have windows automatically tile, and I rather wish there were some way of doing it in GNOME or KDE. Maybe I’ll come to like the minimalism as well, but for now it seems there are a few things missing that could be rather useful.

One of these useful but missing things is a way to monitor network traffic, but it’s not too hard to add it. I’m just surprised that someone hasn’t created a plugin for it already. Briefly, then, here’s the class I use to poll for traffic information…