We’re going to make our Linux desktop look awesome with a tool called Conky. It’s a lightweight system monitor that you can customize to fit with your desktop theme. You can configure how it looks and also what it displays. It can tell you almost anything about your computer (OS,Kernel Version, IP addresses, Fan speeds, CPU Temperature and much much more).

It’s a nice and simple install on Ubuntu. Just run this command in terminal.

sudo apt-get install conky

If you’re running a different Linux you can see installation notes here.

Alright, to start it up hit ALT+F2, type in conky and hit enter. This is what it looks like with the default config…we can make it look a whole lot better. The configuration file is kept in the home folder and it’s called .conkyrc (hit CTRL+H in your home folder to view hidden files and you should see it). If for some reason it isn’t there you can just create your own and save it as .conkyrc. You can also copy mine and change to your liking rather than starting from scratch. This way you’ll have the default structure of the config file.

The config file has two sections, the top is the config parameters and under that is where you tell conky what you want to output. You can set how fast conky updates the info here.

# Update interval in seconds
update_interval 1.0

Below is where you set transparency. Own_window should be set to yes, if I change it to no conky doesn’t show up at all.

# Create own window instead of using desktop (required in nautilus)
own_window yes
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_hints undecorated,below,skip_taskbar,skip_pager
own_window_type normal

A cool text effect if you set this to yes

# Draw outlines?
draw_outline no # amplifies text

If you want borders set this to yes.

# Draw borders around text
draw_borders no
 
# Stippled borders?
#stippled_borders 0
 
# border margins
border_margin 9
 
# border width
border_width 1

Set the default colors here. Makes it easy to switch the colors of your output.

# Default colors and also border colors, grey90 == #e5e5e5
default_color grey90
default_shade_color black
default_outline_color DarkGrey

This section lets you fine tweak conkys position on your screen. Kinda like padding in style sheets.

# Gap between borders of screen and text
gap_x 10
gap_y 30

For a full list of the config parameters you can use visit the documentation page here.

Now on to the TEXT section. This is what you actually see on your desktop. Variables have the dollar sign in front, much like PHP. The color tag is what I used the most to get the look I wanted. The example is below. You open and close the tag like you would in html. The $color at the end closes the tag, anything after will be the default color that you specified in the config section.

${color #663300} The text you want $color

Conky uses pre-defined variables to display things like CPU speed and temperature. Below is an example of the 3 highest programs in memory. Some variables have additional parameters (the example below does). You need brackets for these. Others you can declare using just the dollar sign, $var.

$alignc${color #666666}>> T o p - M e m o r y <<$color
$alignc${color #ffffff}Name               PID   CPU%  MEM%
$alignc${color #666666}${top_mem name 1}${top_mem pid 1}${top_mem cpu 1}${top_mem mem 1}
$alignc${color #ffffff}${top_mem name 2}${top_mem pid 2}${top_mem cpu 2}${top_mem mem 2}
$alignc${color #ffffff}${top_mem name 3}${top_mem pid 3}${top_mem cpu 3}${top_mem mem 3}

When you’re editing the conkyrc and want to see the changes you’ve made, run this command. It just restarts it.

killall conky && conky

Conky has a variable for almost ANYTHING! For a full list, visit the documentation page here.

You’ll also want to add it under Preferences >> Sessions to make conky startup automatically. Name it whatever you want, the command should be conky.

This is a screenshot of my config

Click here to download my Conkyrc.

Have fun setting up your conky!