I am seeking a panel object of some kind which would put a flashing light on the panel for Lubuntu 14.04 LTS, for I have an elderly small screen laptop which has no drive activity lamp.
Lots of such for Windows, not finding it for GNOME/LXDE except for System Monitor, which is overkill for my taste. Just a flashing light on the panel, that's all I care for.
I have a proposal to use keyboard indicators instead. You can find Disk-Indicator program on GitHub: https://github.com/MeanEYE/Disk-Indicator .
Download ZIP archive, unzip it somewhere. It needs to be compiled.
Its Makefile has a glitch though - it treats warnings as errors, so it won't compile right away. But if you edit the 4th string of the Makefile:
COMPILE_FLAGS=-Wall -pedantic -Werror -D _DEFAULT_SOURCE
and remove -Werror option from it, then it will compile properly. After editing it run make in the folder where this Makefile is located.
config.sample file contains the settings: which LED should be used (Scroll Lock is the default), which events to track and which drive should be used. Make a copy of this file and edit this copy as needed. For example, I copied it into .config and here's my setting:
led=x|scroll event=both device=sda
Small help file can be found on GitHub page or in the file README.md.
Now run the program:
./disk_indicator -c .config
If you insist on using the panel indicator or you have no LEDs on the keyboard, you can combine this program with an Indicator for Lock Keys which can be found here: https://launchpad.net/~tsbarnes/+archive/ubuntu/indicator-keylock . It places keyboard indicators on the panel and reacts to this Disk-Indicator program nicely. But it has a side effect - notifications on status change, which are annoying. These notifications can be suppressed - indicator developer provided the method. There's a hidden option to disable them:
gsettings set apps.indicators.keylock notifications false
Also system notifications can be disabled completely, as described here: How to disable system tray notifications in 14.04?
Indicator for Lock Keys is invisible by default, you should press Caps, and it will appear in the tray. Check the setting to show it always and switch to Scroll Lock tracking (both settings can be found in its Preferences).
Icon in the tray may seem not very bright. It is located in /usr/share/icons/hicolor/22x22/status/scroll-lock-on.png and can be edited easily with Gimp.
