FAQ

Frequently asked questions


How to start applications from GKrellM?

Starting applications from GKrellM (i.e. mail reader) is a bit more complicated on Windows compared to Unix systems:

  1. Enter the absolute path to the application you want to start
  2. If the path contains spaces you have to put the whole path into single quotes

For example if you want to start Thunderbird as your mail reader the entry has to look like:

'C:\Program Files\Mozilla Thunderbird\thunderbird.exe'

How can I get rid of the pink dots around text drawn on top of transparent themes?

Due to the way transparency is achieved, antialiased fonts can cause pink pixels around text that is drawn on top of a transparent area. This is caused by translucent pixels around edges of text that get combined with the transparency-color (which happens to be pink). The resulting pixel is not clean pink anymore and as such is not seen as transparent by the windows drawing-code anymore.

There are several possiblities to work around this behavior:

  • Choose a different font. Some fonts if drawn antialiased only use shades of grey for antialiasing their edges. For example using Verdana on Windows Vista draws just fine on transparent areas.
  • Disable ClearType in Windows.
  • Choose a theme that does not draw text on transparent areas.

Charts and krells show no activity or data

Missing chart- or krell-data can have many reasons. The most common one is a broken or incomplete list of “Performance Counters”. There are Knowledgebase Articles like KB241110 or KB300956 which explain how to fix this.

Another reason might be missing access-rights for performance counters if GKrellM is running on Windows Vista without Service Pack 1 installed. A workaround is to start GKrellM with admin-rights. The better fix of course is to install the Service Pack.

GKrellM only shows a total of 4 GB memory

This is normal if you are running GKrellM on a 32-bit version Windows because a single process cannot see more than 4 GB memory at a time (this is a system limitation).

When using the 64-bit version of GKrellM for Windows this limitation is gone.