Conky – I see it all!

Conky Screenshot

Installation – (This part can be found on the site’s Wiki)

Installation is really easy: “[distribution install command] conky”. For example: I use Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu and Ubuntu-based distros. So for my Fedora system, in the terminal I would enter:

# sudo yum install conky

For Debian and any Debian-based system (Ubuntu):

#sudo apt-get install conky

And thats it! It’s installed! You do of course have the option of installing it from source. Instructions on how to do that can be found here on Conky’s Wiki. Now the fun part!

Configuring and Using Conky

When Conky installs, it should automatically create a default “.conkyrc” (Conky configuration) file in your home folder. (My home folder is “user” so my .conkyrc is under /home/user/.conkyrc) If this file is not present then create it (it may be hiding, “Control-h” will find it). Now its time to fill it up! If you have a default Conky config file, then start Conky by typing ‘conky’ in a terminal

You should get a pop up window or a ‘border-less embed’ on you desktop. Conky can be ran as a normal program (in window) or it can be “forked” to your desktop, which just means its embedded. To really get a feel for it, try putting the following in your config file:

Source code

# Default colors
default_color white
default_shade_color black
default_outline_color white
 
#Position on desktop
alignment top_right
 
# Gap between borders of screen and text
# same thing as passing -x at command line
gap_x 12
gap_y 12

and

Source code

TEXT
SYSTEM INFO:
${hr}
Host:$alignr$nodename
Uptime:$alignr$uptime
RAM:$alignr$mem/$memmax
Swap usage:$alignr$swap/$swapmax
Disk usage:$alignr${fs_used /}/${fs_size /}
Processor #1:$alignr${cpu cpu1}%

After you save the config file, restart Conky. The first set of lines are default settings. The second set of lines are the variables that Conky calls on and displays. Conky boast that it has “over 300″ different built in variable (object) that it can display. When it comes to customization, the sky is the limit. For design ideas try Google-ing ‘Linux and Conky’. It’s even possible to run more than one instance of Conky. I have a special script I use for calling multiple Conky config files:

Source code

#!/bin/bash
 
sleep 1 &&
conky -d -c /home/user/.conkyrc &
 
sleep 3 &&
conky -d -c /home/user/scripts/conky/conkyrc.four.conf
 
exit 0;

I have two Conky scripts running – (Downloads) conkyrc1 and conkyrc2. Here are the beautiful results:

Beautiful Conky