ABOUT:

This simple program watches the syslog's or metalog's log file and pops up the 
window whenever the new message comes. You can specify the file to watch and
a regular expression for parsing the log line, so you can watch other than log
files too.

I just wrote it for myself cause I like to know what's goin on with my machine 
and I thought that it might be useful for someone else too.

Thanks to Konstantin Sobolev and his KLogView for inspiration and a few lines 
of code ;)


INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS:

Note that you need automake 1.6 or newer to install this!

To install MetaMonitor do:

<unpack metamonitor>
cd metamonitor/
make -f admin/Makefile.common
./configure --prefix=<prefix>
make
make install (as root)

..where <prefix> is the directory where you want to have metamonitor installed.
The good idea is to use $KDEDIR directory or just /usr.

Read the INSTALL file for detailed installation instructions.

After the first run of MetaMonitor, it can tell you that it could't open a log 
file. Then you need to configure it by clicking right mouse button on 
MetaMonitor's tray icon and choosing 'Configure MetaMonitor' option. You need 
to specify the file in 'Basic configuration' tab and choose a RegExp in 
'Advanced' section.

Note for syslog's users: the default syslog's configuration sets the 
/var/log/messages permission read only by root, so it's unreadable by common 
system users. You need to set the file permission somehow. There are many ways 
to do it as changing a file group to user's group, configuring the logrotate 
daemon or just let syslog to store it's log in additional file with the correct 
permission.

Remember that setting the wrong permission to the log file is a big security 
hole in your system. Be sure what you are doing! You have been warned.


COMMUNICATION WITH METAMONITOR VIA DCOP:

You can send messages to MetaMonitor using dcop and the 'addMessage' command.
MetaMonitor's DCOP interface looks like this metamonitor-<pid> so you need to 
know it's pid before you 'talk' to it. You can just type:

dcop metamonitor-`dcop | grep metamonitor | awk -F- '{print $2}'` metamonitor addMessage 'sender' 'text'

Of course you can change the 'sender' and 'text' :)
This should work on single instance of MetaMonitor. If you're using multiple 
instances, you should modify this line so it can specify which DCOP listener 
you mean.
