Conner's Blog » conky

Great Conky Tutorial

Conner — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 16:37:31 +0000

I just discovered this wonderful conky tutorial at Linux Owns. I am planning on writing up a tutorial combining this one and my Compiz tutorial so it works well in Compiz. Of course if you don’t use different wallpapers on each desktop, linuxown’s tutorial is a good starting point.

Linux Owns - Create a Custom Conky Setup

Conky with Compiz

Conner — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 21:53:37 +0000

Yesterday I wrote about compiling conky from source. Today I want to give a quick rundown on how I set up conky to run with Compiz Fusion with multiple desktops.

First, this doesn’t work perfectly, unfortunately conky uses pseudo transparency, which means it draws it’s own background. This means that if you run one conky instance it will draw the first background it finds. Which is fine until you use multiple background. This causes conky to have the first desktops background on any other desktops you move to. Looks kind of funny.

First a caveat, by using this method you will no longer have desktop icons. If this is a problem for you, this method won’t be your best solution.

First the windows settings in my conkyrc:
own_window yes own_window_hints undecorated own_window_type normal own_window_transparent no

This lets conky draw inside it’s own window, does not show borders, and draws a background.
Second you should Nautilus from drawing your desktop. This is also what keeps you from having icons. Run
gconf and go to apps>nautilus>preferences and unpick “show_desktop”

At this point you could quit, but conky will be in your taskbar, and won’t have transparency. So the next step is to make changes to your compiz settings. Go to System>Preferences>CompizConfig Settings Manager. (If you do not have this entry run sudo apt-get compizconfig-settings-manager)

First go to Window Management and select Window Rules. In each of the following boxes add the following entry “class=Conky”. Skip Taskbar, Skip Pager, Below, Sticky, None movable windows, Non resizable windows, Non minimizable windows, Non Maximizable windows, None closable windows, and No Focus. This will force conky to remain below your windows and sit on all desktops.

Next set some transparency. Click back, then General Options. Choose the Opacity Settings Tab, and choose New under Window Opacities. Under the option Opacity windows put class=Conky. For the window values I use 50, but you can play with this until it suits you.

Now conky should meld well with your desktop, and allow you to have different backgrounds on each desktop.

Build Conky From Source in Ubuntu

Conner — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 23:38:33 +0000

I’ve been using conky for about a week now, and I kept noticing that it would use approximatly 1-5% of my cpu quite frequently. Not that I don’t have the cpu cycles to spare, but that seemed a little goofy. I messed around with the .conkyrc configuration file but it still seemed to take up a bit too much of my cpu.

Falling back to my days of Gentoo, I decided that the best thing to try would be to build conky from source. Here are the steps I took on Ubuntu 8.04 amd64. First I downloaded the source, this should be done from conky’s website. I downloaded the latest version which is 1.5. Then I extracted the source file I downloaded the .tar.bz file so I used the following command.

tar -xjf conky-1.6.0.tar.bz2

I then moved into the directory created using cd

cd conky-1.6.0/

These are the configure options I used.

./configure –enable-wlan –enable-nvidia –enable-rss –enable-network

Conky’s configure is excellent, it runs quickly and gives you a list of all the options that have been enabled. Review this file and be sure that everything you want conky to be able to do is enabled.

Then run the compile

make

Then Install

sudo make install

There you are done and you should find conky runs smoother on your system. Of course this isn’t guaranteed but it can’t hurt.