xosview

xosview is the classic system monitoring tool, for Linux, *BSD, HP-UX, IRIX, Solaris and GNU.

The display can be customised and there are some screenshots contributed by users.

This page is the upstream source for packages included in several Linux distributions and BSD ports trees. xosview is 'lightly' maintained by me, fielding patches from others and making my own small fixes when I have time. The primary aims are to keep xosview bug-free, faithful to its look and feel, and relevant on modern systems.

More recently the original author, Mike Romberg, shared an experimental branch called xosview2 based on older versions of xosview; see the History section for more information.

Source code

The most recent release is xosview 1.22 (3rd May 2020) and you can also download previous releases.

For the very latest changes and the commit history, the source code repository is hosted on Github:

$ git clone git://github.com/hills/xosview.git

Licensing terms are varied, and are contained in the source code.

Mailing list

There is a mailing list for xosview discussion:

xosview-users Use this for questions, configuration, use of xosview, release announcements, bugs and patches.

Note that we share mailing lists with Mike's work on xosview (see the History, below.)

History

In 2011, the project hosted at Sourceforge had been dead for several years. The most active upstream appeared to be a series of patches in the Debian project, maintained by Kartik Mistry.

After several unsuccessful attempts to contact the original authors, myself and Kartik decided that the best thing to do was to pool our efforts into a new 'upstream'. We started by combining the most recent revision from Sourceforge CVS (slightly newer than the 1.8.3 release), and the Debian patches. This web page was created and Git was chosen, with the full history ported over.

Neither of us had access to the Sourceforge project and so it's out-of-date web page (from the 1.8.0) release remained online. We continued to use the project mailing lists for the few public mails, until the devel list mysteriously disappeared around 2013.

In 2015 Mike Romberg, the original author, came out of the woodwork. He'd had a renewed interest in xosview and had been doing some code refactoring. Unaware of our work here, he based his work on version 1.8.3—over 7 years old! Only noticing when the install clashed with a distribution package of xosview 1.16. Unwittingly in doing his work he had lost several years of bug fixes, improvements and platform compatibility (full credit to Tomi Tapper for many of these.)

And so, an 'accidental' fork was born.

The codebases continue to co-exist. We did a tiny bit of work to start Mike's branch at the correct point in our Git history, and Mike has labelled the accidental fork as xosview2. Meanwhile I'm continuing to maintain xosview in a steady way; I have limited time and a view that xosview is a mature and stable project that already serves its purpose well (even though the code itself might be quite inconsistent internally, it's stood the test of time and is stable.) Mike explains his aims too. We both agreed that better communication is needed so we removed the out of date web pages and refreshed the mailing lists.

For now, this xosview is the 'primary' source for the project but both of us are interested to see what the future holds.

Mark Hills