Monday, March 16, 2009

Installing Conky in Ubuntu, a light-weight system monitor

After showing you webilder yesterday in this post, we will continue our desktop customisation guide with Conky. This little application is a light-weight (uses little RAM) system monitor. It brings that geeky feeling to your wallpaper, showing things such as CPU Temperature, Battery information, RAM information, WiFi status and other cool stuff. (see screenshot at the bottom of the article)

To install Conky just go to Terminal and paste the following code:
sudo apt-get install conky
tired of copy pasting this lines? press this link to automatically install conky.

Now here comes the nice part. Conky is fully customizable through a configuration file called ".conkyrc" (of course, without the quotes).

Go to Terminal and type in:
nano ~/.conkyrc

The above command will create a file called .conkyrc in your home directory (home/username/.conkyrc). This is the file we are going to use in order to configure our conky installation. Press this link and copy-paste all the code in our newly created file. (Right-Click > Paste)

To save the file press CTRL + X, press Y (yes, we want to save the changes) and save the file with the same location (don't change it!).

In the steps above we simply created a .conkyrc file, added the code to it and saved it.

Well, it's over! Now you can run conky, enter Terminal and type
conky


Don't like how it looks? Or are you looking for other configuration files? No problem, there are loads of them over the internet. You can try to google it or go to this thread.
Posted by at 4:27 PM
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12 comments:

  1. Does this become part of your desktop (you can open documents and folders over it) or do you lose this portion of your desktop?
    ReplyDelete
  3. you lose portion of the desktop
    ReplyDelete
  4. Documents and folders open OVER it.
    ReplyDelete
  5. If you want conky to run every time you boot without going into the terminal, I would also recommend going to:

    System -> Preferences => Sessions

    click add, for the name: conky, command: conky, and you can add a comment if you want, the next time you reboot it will start right up.
    ReplyDelete
  6. just put the ref, command from conky in prefered aplications or startup app... it works...
    ReplyDelete
  7. in ubuntu 9.10 sessions tab is not in system=>prefrences

    what do i do!?!?!
    ReplyDelete
  8. Reading package lists... Done
    Building dependency tree
    Reading state information... Done
    E: Couldn't find package conky

    always show that msg if i use apt-get
    :(
    ReplyDelete
  9. Anonymous said...

    in ubuntu 9.10 sessions tab is not in system=>prefrences

    what do i do!?!?!
    ===========

    System => Preferences = Startup Applications

    click Add

    type conky in feild one and two

    save it

    your done
    ReplyDelete
  10. I tried this to add conky to my Ubuntu 9.10, followed all the steps listed on this thread and this is what I got when I tried to run it:
    Conky: border_margin is deprecated, please use window.border_inner_margin instead
    Conky: statfs '/home/tmo': No such file or directory
    Conky: desktop window (22000cf) is subwindow of root window (ff)
    Conky: window type - override
    Conky: drawing to created window (0x3e00001)
    Conky: drawing to double buffer
    Conky: statfs '/home/tmo': No such file or directory
    Conky: obj->data.cpu_index 2 info.cpu_count 1
    Conky: attempting to use more CPUs than you have!
    Segmentation fault

    There's more to it than this, but I couldn't copy and paste it all.
    Now I'm VERY new to Ubuntu... What did I do wrong?
    ReplyDelete
  11. wow very helpful post, thank you! spent the past hour trying to do this on my own, ended up with head-ache, then came across this site, and now head-ache is gone. :) thank you!
    ReplyDelete
  12. I am running Maverick10.10 on a desktop and I tried this following all the directions and it doesn't seem to work for me. Here is what I got. The list keeps growing in the terminal
    root@delux24/7:/home/delux247# nano ~/.conkyrc
    root@delux24/7:/home/delux247# conky
    Conky: /root/.conkyrc: 36: no such configuration: 'border_margin'
    Conky: statfs '/home/tmo': No such file or directory
    Conky: desktop window (1c0002d) is subwindow of root window (9d)
    Conky: window type - override
    Conky: drawing to created window (0x3c00001)
    Conky: drawing to double buffer
    Conky: statfs '/home/tmo': No such file or directory
    Conky: can't open /sys/class/power_supply/6/uevent: No such file or directory
    Conky: can't open /proc/acpi/battery/6/state: No such
    ReplyDelete

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