Installing and customizing conky

In the picture you should be able to see that in the top right of the screen, I have various information displayed about my system. You should be able to see a photo of mine, the time my system has been up, CPU usage, RAM usage, file-system, network speed, running processes and more. That's cool isn't it? You can install install it in you Linux too and customize it to make it look the way you want. Well that cool application's name is 'conky'. You can install it by running the command

 sudo apt-get install conky in your terminal

If also need to install lm-sensors, you can use

sudo apt-get install lm-sensors

to install lm-sensor which is required by conky. For my system my conky configuration is at /etc/conky/conky.conf . You may create your conky configuration in your home directory in the name .conkyrc . The configuration file is plain file which you can modify to customize conky as per your need. Below are a few configuration you might want to play with:

• alignment : top_left, top_right, top_middle, bottom_left, bottom_right, bottom_middle, middle_left, middle_middle, middle_right, or none
• default_color: any rgb or svg colour example red, white, black, etc
•  draw_borders : yes, no
• draw_outline : yes , no
• border_width
• update_interval : in seconds

I have attached my conky configuration below:

	# Conky, a system monitor, based on torsmo
	#
	# Any original torsmo code is licensed under the BSD license
	#
	# All code written since the fork of torsmo is licensed under the GPL
	#
	# Please see COPYING for details
	#
	# Copyright (c) 2004, Hannu Saransaari and Lauri Hakkarainen
	# Copyright (c) 2005-2010 Brenden Matthews, Philip Kovacs, et. al. (see AUTHORS)
	# All rights reserved.
	#
	# This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
	# it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
	# the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
	# (at your option) any later version.
	#
	# This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
	# but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
	# MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
	# GNU General Public License for more details.
	# You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
	# along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
	#
	alignment top_right
	background yes
	border_width 3
	cpu_avg_samples 2
	default_color forestgreen
	default_outline_color gold1
	default_shade_color gold
	draw_borders no
	draw_graph_borders no
	draw_outline no
	draw_shades no
	use_xft yes
	xftfont DejaVu Sans Mono:size=12
	gap_x 10
	gap_y 60
	minimum_size 250 5
	net_avg_samples 2
	no_buffers yes
	out_to_console no
	out_to_stderr no
	double_buffer yes
	extra_newline no
	own_window yes
	own_window_colour green
	own_window_transparent yes
	own_window_class Conky
	own_window_type desktop
	stippled_borders 0
	update_interval 3.0
	uppercase no
	use_spacer none
	show_graph_scale no
	show_graph_range no
	TEXT
	${image $HOME/conky.jpg -p 220,0 -s 160x120}
	${voffset 45}
	News: ${scroll 16 ${execi 60 ~/feeds.py} }
	${color forestgreen}$hr
	${color dodgerblue1}Uptime:$color $uptime
	${color dodgerblue1}Frequency:$color $freq MHz $freq_g GHz
	${color dodgerblue1}RAM Usage:$color $mem/$memmax - $memperc% ${membar 4}
	${color dodgerblue1}Swap Usage:$color $swap/$swapmax - $swapperc% ${swapbar 4}
	${color dodgerblue1}CPU Usage:$color $cpu% ${cpubar 4}
	${color dodgerblue1}Processes:$color $processes ${color dodgerblue}Running:$color $running_processes
	$hr
	${color firebrick4}File systems:
	/ $color${fs_used /}/${fs_size /} ${fs_bar 6 /}
	${color firebrick4}Uplink:$color ${upspeed eth0} ${color firebrick4 } - Downlink:$color ${downspeed eth0}
	$hr
	${color brown4}Name PID CPU% MEM%
	${color forestgreen} ${top name 1} ${top pid 1} ${top cpu 1} ${top mem 1}
	${color forestgreen} ${top name 2} ${top pid 2} ${top cpu 2} ${top mem 2}
	${color forestgreen} ${top name 3} ${top pid 3} ${top cpu 3} ${top mem 3}
	${color forestgreen} ${top name 4} ${top pid 4} ${top cpu 4} ${top mem 4}

view raw conky.conf hosted with ❤ by GitHub