Viewing system information with Conky

Conclusion

Conky provides many opportunities to be creative with the use of simple commands to create your own desktop widget. The lack of a graphical user interface is difficult at first, but the configuration follows a defined schema that produces results quickly. Thanks to conky-colors , you can avoid messing around constantly with a configuration file.

Installation

Because of its popularity, Conky can be found in the repositories of all major distributions, so you only need to set it up with the respective administration tools.

Ubuntu users can install Conky easily from the Software Center by searching for conky . You can choose among the conky-all , conky-std , and conky-cli packages; the last choice is mostly suited for use on servers. Alternatively, you can integrate Conky with the sudo apt-get install conky command.

Table 1

Display Options

Option	Description
alignment	Position on the screen (top_left , top_right , top_middle , bottom_left , bottom_right , bottom_middle , middle_left , middle_middle , middle_right , none )
border_width	Width of the border in pixels
default_color	Default widget and border color
use_xft	Enable smooth (anti-aliased) fonts (yes /no )
xftfont	Font used
draw_borders	Enable borders around text (yes , no )
maximum_width	Maximum width of the widget in pixels
minimum_size	Minimum size of the widget in pixels
border_inner_margin	Inner border margin between border and text in pixels
uppercase	Use uppercase characters only (yes /no )

Table 2

Output Options

Option	Description
machine	Processor architecture
color	Changes the color of the output (e.g., ${color grey} )
freq_g	CPU frequencies in GHz (${freq_g 1} shows the value for the first processor)
freq	CPU frequencies in MHz (${freq 1} shows the value for the first processor)
cpu	CPU usage as a percentage (${cpu cpu0} shows total usage for all CPUs)
cpubar	CPU shown as a bar (${cpubar 12,100} shows a bar with height=12, width=100 pixels)
fs_used	Space used by the filesystem
fs_size	Total size of the filesystem
fs_bar	Space used by the filesystem as a bar (<height>),(<width>) <fs>
fs_used_perc	Space used by the filesystem as a percentage