How to conky

I recently re-established my relationship with Conky. If you’re not familiar with Conky, it is a desktop system monitor of sorts for Unix based operating systems. Actually it is much more than just a system monitor. Conky has the capability to monitor email and tail log files to the desktop.

I haven’t actually touched the surface of what Conky can do on top of being some pretty cool eye candy for you. Customizable colors and fonts, cpu, memory, and swap graphs … whew! Too much to type!

Anyway, on to the how to… Conky is easily installed on all Linux systems. Most distros have it in their packaging system. Just emerge, yum or whatever suites your chosen distro. Myself being a Slackware user, ./configure && make && make install went pleasantly smooth. I could have chosen a pre-compiled .tgz from somewhere, or found a SlackBuild script but, this way I have the newest compiled for my system. I’m sure it will go the same for you.

Next is the config file. This is the conkyrc file. When started with the command “conky,” the default file loaded on Slackware is located at /usr/local/etc/conky/conky.conf. Copy this file to ~/.conkyrc and Conky will look there first henceforth. There are many resources for he conkyrc file available on the internet. Listing of the various variables and internal commands. I found one that I liked courtesy of “iplaythisgame” at gnome-look.org
and adapted it to my system and needs. The process took all of 30 minutes to get this great looking, functional eye candy going.

And, last but, not least, have a look at my conky …