For those who already played with Maemo (or Linux in general) command line, the idea to put output from some commands should be already familiar. I was thinking of it also, trying few solutions and this is one of them.

Desktop Command Execution Widget is nice placeholder for shell scripts showing their output on homescreen, which may be useful if you want to have detailed info on N900 status on screen every time, without going to XTerminal and executing specified command. After you install the widget you will get several default scripts that can be placed on desktop and possibility to place more than one on homescreen, so you can get as many as you want! This can easily replace fixed widgets which show only one type of information if you know how to write appropriate script. Let’s start with something easy.

Example 1 – detailed uptime status

Linux users and network administrators may know significancy of big uptime, which means that hardware and software are working well and stable. Among the scripts you already have Uptime, Boot reason and Boot count, we can put all 3 of them on homescreen or modify to get all 3 in one by placing all commands (just copy using Ctrl+C and paste using Ctrl+V) one by one, separating with semicolon ( ; ) or double ampersand if you want to ensure the commands will execute properly in given order.

Example 2 – from the scripts wiki

Widget configuration gives option to see scripts wiki available on maemo.org, let’s take first one and see what it can do. This one uses AWK, powerfull tool for Linux users that will allow to freely manipulate command output and display in desired manner.

Example 3 – echo and favourite quote

You can place anything in this widget, like favourite quote using echo command, which will display the text you enter. So let’s say we want to have two lines with quote and author, we can use:

echo What quote says exactly && echo Author

More examples – try yourself

If you want to use something more try to look at ready commands and mix them in the way you want, try to make something new, it’s fairly easy. If you want to reach higher level check some bash scripting manual, it may become handy. This path opens great possibilities, see the examples, try to be creative, try it yourself!

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