KmTail is a KDE4 version of the venerable Ktail program. It has pretty much
the same features and allows you to monitor various log files. Note that most
files in /var/log are only root-readable so you will have to start KmTail with
kdesu for it to be useful. Log files are added via the File menu as usual or may 
be dragged from a file manager. Tabs may be reordered by dragging them around.

KmTail uses the highly efficient turbotail program instead of GNU tail. This is available
from http://www.vanheusden.com/turbotail/turbotail-0.3.tgz or from your distro's 
repository. The Gentoo ebuild installs it automatically.

KmTail 0.5 now supports reading from named pipes. You can drive the pipe from syslog-ng
and this permits exposing the syslog facility and priority information, thus allowing
much better high-lighting of log messages. To create a named pipe issue the command:

	mkfifo /var/log/messages.fifo

say. Now in your /etc/syslog-ng/syslog-ng.conf you need to create a new destination
something like this:

# destination pipe for general messages
destination p_messages { pipe("/var/log/messages.fifo" 
template("$HOST $FACILITY $PRIORITY $DATE $PROGRAM $PID $MSG\n")
group(wheel) perm(0644); };

The template must be exactly as shown, the other names are up to you. Note that the pipe
need not be opened in read/write mode, as was previously stated! Now add a new log 
statement something like:

log { source(src); filter(f_messages); destination(p_messages); };

Simply open the pipe from KmTail and enjoy! Note because KmTail is reading a pipe, there
is no longer a 1000 line history when you open the file. Also, the high-lighting colours
and background are hard-coded for simplicity.

Robin Atwood ( mailto://robin@binro.org )

