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.
(more…)
Tech Rants 