Having the system log on a background transparent window on the desktop look nice and can be useful (USB key plug events, network connection events and so on).
One way is to use a terminal like aterm or Eterm for instance using the following command:
aterm -tr -bl -ib 0 -title log -name log +sb -geometry '140x16+0+791' -e bash -c "tail --follow=name /var/log/full.log | ccze" &
With the -title and -name option the window decoration can be removed at the window manager level. OK, this is nice.
But when using fluxbox desktop wheeling will not work over the log as it is a window not the desktop.
So I switched to xrootconsole, but it has no color support… not a big deal, I just hacked it in 😉
Here is a sample usage of the hacked xrootconsole, the important part is the -A parameter for ANSI to ccze as the default is to use curses:
tail -n 16 --follow=name /var/log/full.log | ccze -A | xrootconsole --wrap --bottomup -geometry 233x16+1+818 &