This is Plops, a lightweight, just-the-basics desktop widget engine To compile you need freepascal 2.4+ and Imlib2 (plus the dev package (libimlib2-dev or similar)) If you have freepascal all set up then ./compile should build everything for you. There are Lazarus project files for the individual programs in the projectfiles directory. To try out the widgets, for now just go ./plops clock battery calculator Still lacks a bunch of things, Remembering window placement, maganement of depth etc. The calculater uses the script 'evaluate' in the calulator diretorcy to do the acutal calculation . That just calls wcalc. you can either have wcalc installed or change the script to something else that will do the job The battery reads the charge level from a file linked to from within the battery directory. By default it just links to a file containing the number 42. Change the link to point to where the battery level is mapped something like /sys/class/power supply/etc/whathaveyou OMGWTF: I can't see any widgets. LOLWAT: They are in front of the desktop, but behind all other windows. Try minimizing windows. OMGWTF: The widgets have window borders LOLWAT: There isn't a wiget window type so You have to try for a best fit. The window type can be set with --windowtype=_NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_SOMETHING try _NET_WM_WINDOW_TYPE_DOCK, that seems to work for metacity