Posts Tagged ‘Conky’

Conky Lands on top of Windows!!!

May 9th, 2009

I showed you how to install Conky, which is a free software system monitor for the X Window System in my last post. Some of us have experienced that if we add Conky to the Session/Start Application list, after booting Conky tends to appear on top of all windows. If you kill the Conky process and restart it, then the display is fine.

Now the solution to this is :
1. Open a terminal and type : gedit .startconky0
2. Paste this in it :

#!/bin/bash

sleep 35 &&
conky

3. Save and close
4. Type in the terminal : sudo chmod a+x .startconky0
5. In SYSTEM>PREFERENCES>SESSIONS/START APPLICATION
    Click +Add
    Name= Starting Conky
    Command=./.startconky0

Also remove conky from Session/Start Application list when you have added .startconky0

Now reboot, it should work then. :)

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Posted in Techi Gyaan | Comments (1)

Conky – a light weight system monitor for Linux Systems!!!

May 9th, 2009

Conky is a free software system monitor for the X Window System. Not only monitoring system, with a little bit of scripting, it can be useful to know your new mails, weather info etc. Conky is highly configurable and is able to monitor many system variables including the status of the CPU, memory, swap space, disk storage, temperatures, processes, network interfaces, battery power, system messages, e-mail inboxes, Arch Linux updates, many popular music players, and much more. Unlike system monitors that use high-level widget toolkits to render their information, Conky is drawn directly in an X window. But this flexibility comes at a price: all Conky’s settings are stored in the .conkyrc file, which you have to create and tweak manually. The good news is that once you understand the inner workings of the .conkyrc file, you can easily create powerful Conky configuration profiles.

Note: Each time you edit your .conkyrc file you would need to restart conky. That is done by typing the following commands in the terminal “killall conky” to kill conky and “conky&” to start it again.

To install Conky on Ubuntu type in the terminal :
$ sudo apt-get install conky

Now download the following .conkyrc file, if you want your Conky to look like mine :

Download from here

1. After downloading save it as .conkyrc in your home folder.

2. Now, make a directory scripts in your home directory. Download these scripts, extract and copy them inside the directory you just created.

3. Download all these fonts, extract and copy them inside .fonts directory in your home directory. If you don’t have the .fonts directory, you need to create it. You might need to have administrative privileges to create this directory.

4. Open .conkyrc file. Look for this line:
${execpi 300 python ~/scripts/gmail_parser.py yourgmailusername yourgmailpassword 3}
Replace yourgmailusernamewith your username and yourgmailpassword with Gmail password. You might also need to install python-feedparser if your mail does not show up.
$ sudo apt-get install python-feedparser

5. To monitor your hard disk and CPU temperature install lm-sensors and hddtemp
$sudo apt-get install hddtemp
$sudo apt-get install lm-sensors

6. Now try and run conky by executing conky& in terminal, if everything is correct you would be able to see conky on your desktop.

If you need more info :
1. More variables for conky
2. Settings variables for conky
3. More Conky scripts can be found here.

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Posted in Fun Gyaan, Techi Gyaan | Comments (3)