MeRT

Conky Desktop

Conky is a free, light-weight system monitor for X, that displays any information on your desktop. Conky is licensed under the GPL and runs on Linux and BSD. The biggest issue that I have had with conky is setting it up.

It’s kind of a pain to get everything up and running just right.  Recently I ran across CONKY-colors. It is a nice little program to help you set up conky. To get CONKY-colors to work properly you will have to do several things.

sudo apt-get install python-statgrab ttf-liberation hddtemp lm-sensors conky-all
sudo chmod u+s /usr/sbin/hddtemp
sudo sensors-detect #answering Yes (default) to all questions, even that last one that defaults to No

Then restart your session. Now we need to extract, make, and install CONKY-colors. So extract the files, and get into the directory within a terminal. From there you can make and install CONKY-colors.

make
sudo make install

Finally you will be able to generate your conky setup. Currently my setup is as follows:

conky-colors --theme=gnome-wine --dark --ubuntu --cpu=2 --updates --proc=4 --clock=default --hd=default --hdtemp1=sda --network --unit=F --weather=USUT0187 --weatherplus

If you have multiple hard drives that you’d like to keep track of the temps on as well, then add them to the command as

--hdtemp2=sdb --hdtemp3=sdc --hdtemp4=sdd

After you have that all configured you can simply run

conky -c /home/michael/.conkycolors/conkyrc

Obviously switch “michael” for your user name. I’d also recommend adding that to your startup applications.