I had better luck with this program for the ip address : /sbin/ifconfig | grep 'inet ' | grep -v 127.0.0.1 | cut -d : -f 2 | cut -d ' ' -f 1 This uses the 'ifconfig' program, which was installed on my system ( /sbin/ip wasn't ) Nice program though. Also, the when the desktop background is white/grey/silver the text gets hard to read.