Root-Portal is a program designed to display files and various other things on the root window. (the desktop)
See INSTALL for generic installation instructions
Root-Portal comes with a GNOME applet (under Add to panel -> Utility). If the applet doesn't appear to be available, it may be because GNOME is installed under /usr, while Root-Portal is installed under /usr/local. For some reason (on the author's system at least), GNOME only looks for applets under the path where it is installed. If anyone knows a nice way of fixing this (like if there is a GNOME config file or environment variable that you can set to specify paths to search for that kind of stuff), please let me know. The best way as a user to get around it, is assuming your GNOME is installed in /usr, to install Root-Portal from a binary package (deb, rpm etc). Failing that however, it should work to specify that you want root-portal installed under /usr (although stuff installed from source (not by the packaging system) should really go under /usr/local). Anyway, to do this do:
./configure --prefix=/usr && make && sudo make install
Or something like that.
If you want to monitor a remote system using the remote module but
that remote system doesn't have the libraries needed for a full
root-portal install (X, GNOME2 etc), you can run:
./configure --without-x
to get such a compilation (help with also not be installed).