Conky Dotfiles

Conky Dotfiles is a mash up of various examples Corky from across the 'net. Therefore, out of respect, guilt, and a morbid fear of lawyers, I maintain a reasonably complete list of sources. Check out the references / sources below and you may find a few additional gems.

Conky

Conky is a light-weight system monitor for X Window that displays any information on your desktop. It is highly configurable as it is able to monitor literally any aspect of your system from hard-drive temperature through number of users logged in to currently played music song. Unlike system monitors that use high-level widget toolkits to render their information, Conky is drawn directly in an X window (typically the desktop). This allows it to consume relatively fewer system resources. 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, and much more.

Installation of Conky

Installation of Conky is simple. Open up terminal and enter:

# install conky
sudo apt-get -y install conky-all

Starting Conky (or any program) at Login

Typically, you want Conky to automatically start at the boot. You start corky with the $HOME/.xsessionrc file with conky --pause=20 --config=/home/jeff/.conky/conkyrc, but for Gnome, find and open the Startup Applications GUI utility and use it to set Conky to start at the boot time. A potential alternative is to create a script via the gnome-session-properties utility, or equivalently, create the following file named ~/.config/autostart/conky.desktop:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=conky --pause=20 --config=/home/jeff/.conky/conkyrc
Hidden=false
NoDisplay=false
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
Name[en_US]=Conky
Name=Conky
Comment[en_US]=Conky system monitor for the X Window Syste
Comment=Conky system monitor for the X Window System

Debugging Conky

To launch Conky from the commandline, using your resource file, you do the following

# launch conky using your $HOME directory conky resource file
conky

# launch conky using another resource file
conky -c /home/jeff/.conky/src/conky-test

By default, Conky monitors the eth0 & wlan0 network interface, but there’s a good chance that your network interface uses a different name. Obtain your network interface name and then replace the eth0 & wlan0 values. You can get your network interface via this command:

# list network interfaces that are up & working
$ ip address | grep '^[0-9]' | grep 'state UP'
2: eno1: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc fq_codel state UP group default qlen 1000
4: wlx94dbc95110ca: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc mq state UP group default qlen 1000

Make updates to the ~/.conkyrc file as required.

An easy way to force Conky to reload your ~/.conkyrc resource file is to us the command killall -SIGUSR1 conky. This saves you the trouble of having to kill and then restart.

**NOTE:**I also discovered that while conky is running and your concurrently editing the .conkyrc file in vi, saving the file appears to cause conky to restart and read the new .conkyrc … nice.

References / Sources