Console Junkie: Conky Makes Your Desktop Awesome!

What is conky?

Conky is a light-weight system monitor, which can display any information you want on the desktop. You can get it here, or you can simply install it with:

sudo apt-get install conky

If you want my conky setup though, you should compile it from source. I’ve explained why further in the post, so read through the whole thing before you go setting up your own conky. Here’s what my desktop looks like:

As you can see, I show music stats on the right hand side. I use mpd for music. Now, conky has in-built mpd support, which means using these conky variables for mpd make it faster and lighter on resources. However, these variables are disabled by default in the version available in Ubuntu repos. You won’t be able to use them if you do a sudo apt-get install conky. Hence the compile-from-source bit. If you are not using mpd for music, you might as well do a sudo apt-get install. If you are compiling from source, this is an excellent guide.

So that’s done. Next you will need to download my conky config files and other scripts required for the setup. You can download them from here. Extract them and rename the folder as scripts. I keep all my scripts at /home/vedang/Source/scripts/, and this path is hardcoded into the scripts everywhere. Please search for the string and change it appropriately.

Giving the HOME directory it’s own partition

The more you use linux, the more you begin to realise that your HOME directory should be on a different partition from your ROOT directory. This way, your config files remain unaffected by system crashes, OS reinstalls etc. Now _if_ you started out without a separate partition for your home directory, here’s how you can rectify the problem.

Basically, we have to do three tasks.
1) Choose a partition for your HOME directory
2) Copy ALL files from your current home to this new partition
3) Make an entry in fstab to mount this partition as /home on bootup.

We’ll be using a tool called GParted to make our life easy.

sudo apt-get install gparted

Yes, it’s a GUI tool and yes, I also know how to do the same things in a more complicated way using pure CLI. However, this is a beginner guide. So I’ll leave that part as an exercise for the interested reader.

Right! So lets get started:

1) Choose a partition for your HOME directory

a) Run GParted. You will have to use sudo, as you need root privileges to use gparted. gparted messes with your partitions, so don’t fool around unless you know what you are doing.

b) Select the partition. It obviously has to have enough free space to hold all the files in your current home. You may or may not format it, though I recommend you format it with ext4 as the filesystem.

c) Note the UUID of the partition. You can do this by selecting the partition, clicking on the Partition tab in the main menu, and clicking on Information. Also note the device name of the partition (something like /dev/sda3)

Console Junkie: Installing MPD and grooving away to glory!

What is MPD?

Quoting from this article:

Music Player Daemon (MPD) allows remote access for playing music (MP3, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC, Mod, and wave files) and managing playlists. MPD is designed for integrating a computer into a stereo system that provides control for music playback over a local network. It is also makes a great desktop music player, especially if you are a console junkie, like frontend options, or restart X often.

In this post, I’ll be explaining how to get MPD up and running on Ubuntu (9.04). If you are working on some other platform, you can simply compile from source wherever applicable. Also, this post is mainly about using mpd as a desktop music player. The configuration part of it is common across distributions. So lets get started!

First, we need to install mpd.

sudo apt-get install mpd

Let us now configure it and get it up and running. You can either directly configure mpd for system-wide usage (/etc/mpd.conf) or you can configure it on a per user basis (~/.mpdconf).

sudo cp /etc/mpd.conf ~/.mpdconf

Before we edit our .mpdconf file, we need to create a few directories.

mkdir -p ~/.mpd/playlists

A quick-tips Emacs post

In this post, I’m basically going to just cut-paste code from my .emacs file, customizations that I feel have been most useful to me:

1) Cscope customizations

;for cscope
(load-file "~/.emacs.d/xcscope.el")
(require 'xcscope)
(setq cscope-do-not-update-database t)
(define-key global-map [(control f3)] 'cscope-set-initial-directory)
(define-key global-map [(control f4)] 'cscope-find-this-file)
(define-key global-map [(control f5)] 'cscope-find-this-symbol)
(define-key global-map [(control f6)] 'cscope-find-global-definition)
(define-key global-map [(control f7)] 'cscope-find-this-text-string)
(define-key global-map [(control f8)] 'cscope-pop-mark)
(define-key global-map [(control f9)] 'cscope-find-functions-calling-this-function)
(define-key global-map [(control f10)] 'cscope-find-called-functions)
(define-key global-map [(control f11)] 'cscope-display-buffer)
;cscope settings end here

An earlier tutorial I wrote for the cscope-newbie.

2) Auto-completion with Smart Tab

An ‘Agile’ Story

Trainer: “So you have stories“
Voice From The Crowd: “Like RAMAYAN!”
Trainer: “Riiight.. let’s go with that. Then you have sub-stories”
Voice: “Like Hanuman Eating The Sun!”
Trainer: *bit harassed* “Okay, and you also have tasks.”
Voice: “Like??”
Trainer: “Like the building the Ram Setu!”
*——–silence in the crowd——–*
Voice: “Wait, how the hell do you track that?!!?”
Trainer: *shrugs* “Jai Shree Ram!”