Graphical Manager for systemd

    The init system systemd has been being set as the default initer for many Linux distributions including the latest releases of Ubuntu. It's a pretty powerful piece of software with lots of advantages over the previous init system before it, yet it maintains an ease of use when creating or reading it's unit files.


    Systemd uses what are called unit file to handle tasks such as starting up the programs required to boot a Linux PC. The are three types of these unit files that come to mind, the 1st is the .service file that replaces custom init scripts that would reside in /etc/init.d/. The 2nd type of unit file is the .socket which replaces entries in /etc/services and the configuration files the would reside in /etc/xinet.d/ the 3rd type of unit file is the .timer file which am not sure there was an equivalent previously. The .timer file is pretty hand, for example one can be configured to back up a file ever 15 minutes, or execute a program 15 minutes after logging in.

    There are really good command line utilities to browse, manage, and view the unit files, like listing out all unit files with systemctl list-units, viewing the status of a unit file with systemctl status unitfile or viewing the logs associated to certain service file with journalctl -u unitfile. These are perfect for servers but for most that use Linux as a desktop those new command could be a pain to remember, that's where the project Kcmsystemd comes in.

    Systemd control module for KDE. Provides a graphical frontend for the systemd daemon, which allows for viewing and controlling systemd units, modifying configuration files, as well as as viewing logs. Kcmsystemd integrates in the System Settings dialogue in KDE.

Here is a screenshot of kcmsystemd.

This is a screenshot of the unit types it can filter for.

The menu that appears when right clicking a unit file allows for starting, stopping or restarting a unit file, and the enable disable option tell it to start at boot or not.

To get some more info about a given unit in the list just hover the mouse over the unit file to get this dialog.

   The github page for the code behind this provides instructions to build the latest version, but it will require an up to date version of KDE 5. https://github.com/rthomsen/kcmsystemd

A built release can be found at http://download.kde.org/stable/systemd-kcm/

On ArchLinux and running KDE? This is already in the community repository & can be installed with:
pacman -S systemd-kcm