On Mon, 27 Aug 2012 23:59:06 + (UTC)
Duncan 1i5t5.dun...@cox.net wrote:
Peter Nikolic posted on Mon, 27 Aug 2012 11:21:45 +0100 as excerpted:
I useed to use Qtdmm on the older system at home but that box died
so the rebuilt box is up to date KDE 4.9.00 now qtdmm doe not run
i have been looking around for something to replace it with does
anyone know of something or even if qtdmm is being ported
FWIW, a quick google told me that qtdmm is qt-based (qt2 and qt3,
apparently not ported to qt4) digital multimeter readout and recorder
software. IOW, it's designed to hook up to a specific type of
electronic meter hardware, without which it's likely to be rather
useless.
At this point, it's a pretty safe bet that if it hasn't been ported
to qt4 already, it's not going to be. Qt4 has been mature for some
time now, and development effort is now focused on qt5 (which was due
for a beta about now, but what with qt ownership transfer from Nokia,
the beta has been delayed a bit), so while existing qt4-based apps
(including all of kde4) are likely to continue to be supported for
awhile, if it's not on qt4 yet, chances are it's not now going to be
ported.
There's a smaller chance it'd be ported to qt5, skipping qt4, but
that's not likely either, as if it hasn't been ported by now, chances
are that it's basically dead, unless someone else decides to pick up
development.
Replacement is the next question. It's here where even a short
description like I provided above would have been helpful, as there's
a fair chance that people might not know what qtdmm is, but still
know about a replacement, if they knew what they were looking for a
replacement for.
The first thing I'd suggest is doing the google I just did, if
necessary to find contact details for the author, then get in touch
with him and simply ask. Maybe it simply hasn't been ported because
there's already a better solution available, and he can suggest
that. Or maybe all he needs to know is that someone's still using
the app and is interested. It could be he's done the port already,
and just didn't think anyone was interested any longer so he never
posted it. It's simple enough to ask, and you'll never know if you
don't.
Beyond that... I'm not an expert in the area by far, but what
immediately struck me when looking at the screenshots is how similar
the graphs looked to the routine voltage, power, etc, computer status
graphs I run more or less constantly, here. There's at least two
whole entire kernel driver areas dedicated to drivers for sensors of
that type, and quite a variety of software that can hook into them to
drive graphing, logging, etc. lm_sensors is lower level userland
software that can be used to program and read these sensors and
output to the text terminal or to a file, and there's a whole host of
GUI software that builds on that. ksysguard (aka system monitor), the
yasp-scripted plasmoid, and superkaramba are all kde4 based software
that can be used for this, and there's gkrellem and various
gdesklets, konqy, etc, for gtk and non-kde use.
But, what I do NOT know is how well that existing software works with
generally external sensors, as its more common use and the way I use
it here is to report on the computer's own system sensors. I AM
sufficiently familiar with yasp-scripted and superkaramba at least,
that I know if there's lower level drivers/software available for
those external sensors that can make the information available either
as text files (perhaps in the kernel's /sys tree) or output it to the
text console as STDOUT, it's very possible to scrape that data and
display it in the yasp-scripted or superkaramba GUI as text,
bar-graphs or plotter/ line-graphs, as desired, because I do just
that, file or STDOUT scraping, for a number of the outputs I display
running plotters for, updating them once a second, here.
The big question, then, is whether there's drivers or user-mode
software available to take the raw output as presented by the
external device and present it as a text file or as STDOUT. Chances
are, especially for relatively common devices, yes. Linux has better
support for this sort of thing now than ever before, with a lot of
hardware manufacturers specifically cooperating with the Linux
community to ensure that drivers are available for their hardware.
That would explain why this specific specialized software hasn't been
ported -- no need as there's much more widely applicable general
solutions now available.
But... not being a specialist in the area, I really don't know the
specifics.
There are most likely area specific mailing lists and/or web forums
available, that would have better information. I'd suggest googling,
maybe something line your hardware brand and model, and linux (with
or without driver). It's quite possible there's already quite a
variety of supported software available and you
