BuntuBlog!

Scripting Conky! March 1, 2009

For those of you who love to do some scripting and displaying of computer related data on your screen, conky is just the program for you!

You should already have the repo for grabbing Conky, so fire up terminal and enter:

sudo apt-get install conky

Next, fire up conky by typing the following in your terminal:

conky

You should see the default conky script show up on your screen

Default Conky Script

You can now monitor some valuable information about your PC like the frequency your CPU is running at, RAM usage, number of processes etc.

The other fabulous thing you can do is create some custom scripts to display data that you personally want to see, and to dress up the dialog to make it more enjoyable to look at.  An example of one of my custom conky scripts is shown below:

Custom Conky Script

As you can see I’ve dressed it up a bit and added some more information like how much I have downloaded/uploaded, as well as what programs are using the most ram/cpu.

Scripting for conky isn’t all too difficult if you have any experience with any programming language as well as toying with the unix terminal/environment.  Here is an example to get your started

conkyrc

Make sure to rename the file to .conkyrc and place it into your home directory for the changes to take effect!  Have fun.