Making use of my extra monitor

Sep 2016 • Category: HomeLab • Program: KVM • Process: Config

Since I use my laptop screen and only one of my dual monitors for my daily driver, I have the second one hooked up to Virtualizor, my KVM host. I would _love_ to have it output stats about the machines that are running - either graphically or just a terminal dislplay.

Xorg on host

So I’ll have to put X on the host. I should try out wayland, but I’ll save that for another day.

Install

# yum install virt-manager xorg-x11-server-Xorg xorg-x11-server-common xorg-x11-server-utils xorg-x11-server-xinit xorg-x11-drivers xterm

Ratpoison

https://copr-be.cloud.fedoraproject.org/results/shassard/ratpoison/epel-7-x86_64/ratpoison-1.4.8-1.el7.centos/

.xinitrc

xset dpms 0 0 0 &
xset s off &
ratpoison &
virt-manager --no-fork

virt-manager will fork into the background without the –no-fork option set. This would then kill X as it has no process in the foreground of the .xinitrc to keep it running.

Gsettings

I hope you’re running tmux, ‘cause to run these, you’ll have to have X running and virt-manager running. (I’m not sure about that last part, but it works like that.) Also, that weird bit about DISPLAY=:0 needs to be inside of the loop and executed before every gsettings command. It’s freakin’ stupid, but over ssh, necessary. In fact, for pretty much every command that deals with the output, you’ll have to precede it with DISPLAY=:0.

# for i in host-cpu-usage cpu-usage memory-usage network-traffic disk-usage; do \
    DISPLAY=:0 gsettings set org.virt-manager.virt-manager.vmlist-fields $i true; done

# for i in enable-memory-poll enable-net-poll enable-cpu-poll enable-disk-poll; do \
    DISPLAY=:0 gsettings set org.virt-manager.virt-manager.stats $i true; done

# DISPLAY=:0 gsettings set org.virt-manager.virt-manager.details show-toolbar false

GTK

# mkdir /etc/gtk-3.0

/etc/gtk-3.0

[Settings]

gtk-application-prefer-dark-theme = true

End result

Now I can go boot up my server, and when I can ssh into it at all, I can run startx and the CTRL-C and still have it running. Awesome. Persistant resource monitor.

TODO:

Start on boot - Systemd magic

Rotate screen - Compiling retired kernel module