Linux distros have a broad range of managers. In KDE, the default utility is called KNetworkManager. In Gnome, it is - aptly called - Gnome Network Manager. Some Linux users do not like either of these two. Enter wicd.

One of the first things I do upon installing a Linux distribution is put the Network Monitor applet on my GNOME panel. Watching the blue lights twinkle on and off makes me aware of network traffic.

Battery Status is a project for GNOME, that shows information about laptop battery state. It comes with a lot of additional features, so usual icon of GNOME Power Manager can be removed from Notification/Indicator Area.

Traffic monitor applet for GNOME.Netspeed is an applet that shows how much traffic occurs on a specified network device (ethernet card, wireless LAN card, or dial-up).

Music Applet is a small, simple GNOME panel applet that lets you control a variety of different music players from the panel. Music Applet provides easy access to information about the current song and the most important playback controls.

network management on linux differs from distro to distro. trying various of these i liked what SuSE did over the year. they included a network manager like applet ‘knetwork’ with kde 3 which even included isdn (ppp) links. but NM does a very bad job if things don’t work. there is no debugging possible.

Notification Area applet is a nifty tool that lets you keep an eye on application activity of your Gnome desktop. Quite often new users tend to accidental it in the applet adding and removing frenzy that we all succumb to one time or other.

The gnome main menu applet was created as another effort for people to try and use awn and get rid of all their gnome bars. Well as another stride in this direction more has been added to this applet.

KDE 4.3 is out now and the KNetwork Manager has matured quite a bit. Now this KDE tool has reached a point where it not only works consistently, it’s also quite easy to use – almost surpassing the GNOME Network Manager in user-friendliness.