Conky

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Contents

INTRO

conky is a text-based system monitor for Linux boxes. It sits on your desktop displaying a machine's status and is refreshed at a rate based on your choice. Very suitable for low-end machines and those that do not need a system monitor as sophisticated as gkrellm. Note this is a replacement for torsmo, torsmo is no longer maintained.

ASSUMPTIONS

You have the internet and root access on your machine. May involve editing of text-based files to change configurations.

INSTALLATION

I've read man hier a couple of times and it seems to suggest installing source-based packages in /usr/local/src. This is a recommendation that we follow in this case from hereon.

GRABBING THE SOURCE CODE

Get it from http://conky.sourceforge.net/ select your nearest mirror

as root

mv conky-1.4.1.tar.gz /usr/local/src
cd /usr/local/src/
tar zxf conky-1.4.1.tar.gz
cd conky-1.4.1

If you haven't got them already

apt-get -y install xorg-x11-libs xorg-x11-devel

There are a number of install options that you can configure for conky. You can ensable or disable some features as required...

./configure --help | less

Once you've decided on the options that you'd like to include, an example

./configure --[add your options here]

Soooo

./configure && make install

as normal user check that the docs have been installed with

man conky

Read the docs to see all of the stuff that you can include with this system monitor. Copy the sample file to your home dir

cp conky.sample ~/.conkyrc
cp /usr/local/src/conky-1.4.1/doc/conkyrc.sample ~/.conkyrc

You can now start using conky with

conky

The installation does not take more than about 5 mins for a PIII running on 256mb ram @ 750MHz

and can modify conky by editing ~/.conkyrc

Note that this file is -hidden- in your home dir. It's good file to have as you can run/stop this app without being root. You can also change the variables as often as you like, also without the need for root access.

DOCUMENTATION

The man page is a bit light. You'd get more out of this app by reading the config file.

less ~/.conky

Spend some time with this file. The developer has made modding this file easy. Lines starting with a '#' are comments and are not executed. The developer has included lots of these lines so that you can get the gist of the options available.


ABOUT THE SOURCE CODE

sloccount /usr/local/src/conky/
Categorizing files.
Finding a working MD5 command
....
Found a working MD5 command.
Computing results.
SLOC    Directory       SLOC-by-Language (Sorted)
10695   top_dir         ansic=9982,sh=692,python=21
0       app-admin       (none)
0       autom4te.cache  (none)
0       CVS             (none)
0       doc             (none)
Totals grouped by language (dominant language first):
ansic:         9982 (93.33%)
sh:             692 (6.47%)
python:          21 (0.20%)
....
Total Physical Source Lines of Code (SLOC)                = 10,695
....
....
Please credit this data as "generated using David A. Wheeler's 'SLOCCount'."

What does it look like

There are some screenshots with conky running here http://howtoforge.com/image/tid/44?from=12 http://howtoforge.com/node/874

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