Recently I realized what I've gotten my Amiga setup almost perfect. I figured since I've gotten my Amiga setup running tight I felt it was a good time to share what I have done to get there. This is the part 1 of many to describe my setup and how I got there. For this first part I'm going to start on my AmiDock.

Looking at my app dock there are two dockies I can't live without. First is the network monitor, second is the cpu monitor. Along for the ride is Granite. The way I have setup my AmiDock is with an icon doc and an app dock. The idea is all app dockies are placed in the upper right hand corner where the icons are centered at the bottom of the screen. This allows me to better control the visual layout of my workbench.

The network doc is newer and written by Guillaume Boesel and can be found on os4depot. I like the network graph view to let me know if there are any downloads off screen, and the performance of my samba setup (more on samba later). The utility has several features and I prefer the vertical view with a transparent backdrop. Here are the settings used to create this look from the docky's icon:

(DEBUG=ON)
(LEFT_VBAR=ON)
(MIDDLE_VBAR=OFF)
(RIGHT_VBAR=ON)
(INTERFACE=RTL8139)
(BACK_RGB = 000000)
(VBAR_RGB = 3264AA)
(IN_UP_RGB = FF0000)
(IN_DOWN_RGB = 640000)
(OUT_UP_RGB =6400C8)
(OUT_DOWN_RGB = 3264FF)
(TEXT_IFACE_RGB = FFFFFF)
(TEXT_IN_RGB = FFFFFF)
(TEXT_OUT_RGB = FFFFFF)
ORIENTATION=V

The CPU monitor has been around a long time and was written by Jörg Strohmayer. You can download the tool here. It provides a display with CPU temperature, Date, Time, and the CPU performance. I've found this to be very helpful to find when my programs are behaving badly or if the system gets hung up. Here are the settings used to create this look from the docky's icon:

DONOTWAIT
TOP=26
LEFT=2000
(STARTICONIFIED)
(SETENV)
(TEMPOFFSET=10)
(TEMPFACTOR=1.5)
FAHRENHEIT
(NOGUI)
(WARNTEMP=65)
CLOCK
(IGNORETASKS=CPUInfo.CPUTask|CPUClock.CPUTask|dnetc crunch #1)
SHOWDATE
UPDATESPEED=2

The final icon in the App dock is not a docky but an application icon. The application Granite (download) is a firewall of sorts for the Amiga. What this does is allows or denies programs access to the Internet. In this way I can know when a program ones to access an online resource. The tool is very simple to use, when running any program that attempt to access the internet will cause granite to pop a requestor to allow or deny. As you can see from the screenshot:

All are great tools to spice your AmiDock and I highly recommend them!