Netactview, a graphical tool to monitor Network Activity on a Linux system

A few days ago, I wrote about monitoring your system's network activity on linux, a command line approach. Someone also commented about a graphical tool available to monitor various network connections on your system, netactview. So, here is its small review.

Netactview is a pretty cool tool with GTK2 graphical interface to monitor your system's network activitiy. It is similar in functionality with netstat. Using the graphical interface you can easily filter out established, closed connections. Althought it should be enough for all your needs, as a desktop user, but it is a really simple tool. Its probably the simplest a network monitoring tool can be :), light and smart.

The filter for example, works just like a firefox find function. Just looks for the string, actually thats exactly what we did with netstat (grep <port_number ), so I can't complain about this software.

Anyways, netactview is not availlable in the default repository of ubuntu, you will have to download the deb from its sourceforge homepage.

Either double click the package or run the following command to install it.

[shredder12]$ sudo dpkg -i netactview.deb