Conky

Conky is an open source, free, advanced, lightweight and highly configurable system monitoring utility for the X Window System, based on the Torsmo application. It will display customizable desktop widgets on your GNU/Linux operating system.

In other words, Conky will provide real-time information the kernel version, uptime, system time, network interface, memory usage, swap usage, hostname, machine/system name, temperatures, battery, number of processes running or sleeping, as well as filesystem statistics.

Conky is designed in such a way that it can display just about anything, and thanks to its many built-in objects, you will also be able to run scripts and programs directly from it. It is implemented in C and uses Lua for its configuration files.

Getting started with Conky

It is quite easy to get started with Conky on your GNU/Linux distribution. All you have to do is to install the package either by using the pre-built binaries found on the main software repositories of your operating system, or by compiling the sources.

Of course, the easiest way is to open the package manager app of your distribution, search for the ‘conky’ package and install it, along with all of its runtime dependencies. If Conky is not available for your OS, download the latest version from Softoware.

After downloading the source archive, unpack it, open a Terminal app, navigate to the location of the extracted archive files (e.g. cd /home/softoware/conky-1.9.0), run the ‘./configure && make’ command to configure and compile Conky, and then run the ‘sudo make install’ command to install it. To use it, simply run the ‘conky’ command in a terminal emulator.

Command-line options

Among the Conky’s command-line options, which can be viewed at a glance by running the ‘conky --help’ command in a terminal emulator, we can mention the ability to specify a custom configuration file, to create a new default config file, to force the program to run in background as a daemon, as well as to specify the widget’s alignment on the screen.

Additionally, users will be able to specify the font to use, the X11 display to use, the window ID to draw, the x and y position on the screen, the text to render, the number of times to update Conky, and the update interval.

What is new in this release:

• Fix crash when using $if_match with objects that may return a null pointer (like $rss, $weather, or $curl before data is available)

What is new in version 1.7.1.1:

• Fixed a regression which causes fonts to not be rendered properly with certain types of windows
• Fix bug in comments within TEXT (where the line contains just '#') (sf.net #2803586), thanks Pavelo
• Fix bug in $mails (sf.net #2802529, thanks Nikos)

What is new in version 1.7.1:

• Fix hostname resolution for mpd_hostMade sure that no X11 stuff is in the binary with --disable-X11
• Added inotify support to reload the config when modified automatically on systems that support itAdded inotify support for reloading Lua scripts automagically
• Added support for the Lua programming languageAdded support for rending images by way of Imlib2Patch to fix rounding error with CPU values (thanks Filipe)Added support for execbar without X
• Added another builtin config that is used when compiled with --disable-X11
• Fix segfault when there is no config available
• Make sure if_gw isn't checked twice
• Added arguments to hwmon for value precalculation
• Added support for APC UPS daemon monitoringFixed hwmon for kernel 2.6.29Fixed removing comments
• Allow the use of '#' for comments within text area (can be escaped with #')
• Only include disp when neededMade sure update_uname works without X11
• Fix occasional cpubar segfaultsAdded top_name_width config option
• Added some completely pointless OpenMP optimizations(?)
• Added Sony VAIO fanspeed info (thanks Yeon-Hyeong)
• Added diskio_avg_samples patch (thanks Yeon-Hyeong)Fixed $texeci regression
• Added $combine, a var that places 2 other vars next to each other, even if they have a output of multiple lines. This also makes the moving of RSS-itemes with $goto (see change from 2009-04-19) no longer necessary.
• Various XMMS2 updates (thanks Lassi)Make ALSA mixers available on Linux, and added $if_mixer_mute (thanks
• Make it possible to place spaces in front of RSS-items as a workaround for the problem that $goto only moves the first RSS-item. This is only a workaround and should be replaced by a permanent fix that makes $goto move all RSS-items !
• Fix broken compilation without X11
• Added default_bar/graph/gauge_size config options (thanks wire64 for the idea)
• Added eval text object to realise double parsing
• Added gauge widget patch, sf.net id #2676128 (thanks Aner)

What is new in version 1.7.1 RC1:

• Added inotify support to reload the config when modified automatically on systems that support it
• Added inotify support for reloading Lua scripts automagically

What is new in version 1.7.0:

• This release contains tons of bug fixes, new features, and general improvements since 1.6.1. My main focus for this release has been to improve the overall quality of Conky, and in order to accomplish that I allowed for a pretty long incubation period.

What is new in version 1.6.2 Pre 1355:

• Add if_match object comparing strings, floats and ints

What is new in version 1.6.2 Pre 1285:

• Switching from svn to git repository. The repo can be viewed from http://git.omp.am/?p=conky.git;a=summary and you can clone the repo with: git clone git://git.omp.am/conky.git
• Fix for wrong usage of strncat (thanks Pavol)
• Adds a variable if_xmms2_connected to hide objects when xmms2d is not running (thanks Lassi)
• Fix for buffer overflow with $execi (thanks Cesare)
• Fetch volume through Audacious API (thanks Erik)
• Removed duplicate sanity check for diskio
• Added runtime debugging output
• Added template support
• Applied OpenBSD patches
• Added $if_mpd_playing patch (thanks tarpman)
• Introduced (buggy) support for IMAP IDLE
• Added support for MOC (the console audio player) (thanks henux)
• Added scroll step patch (thanks asto)
• Maybe fix missing include bug (http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=235233)
• Improve timed_thread interval timing
• Improve Conky's overall interval timing
• Added small patch to support negative values (such as negative disk capacity) (thanks hinokind)
• Improved hddtemp support
• Fixed bug with freq_dyn on x86_64 (thanks Miroslav)
• Fixed buffer overflow in update_net_stats() (thanks Miroslav)
• Small fix for nvidia mem freq (thanks Cezary)

What is new in version 1.6.1:

• Fix compile error when MPD support not enabled
• Add option to specify number of retries for IMAP/POP3 stuff (via -r)
• Smaller $nvidia improvements
• Added missing header to package dist