Conky is a free, light-weight system monitor for X, that displays any information on your desktop.
Conky has more than 250 built in objects, including support for:
… and much much more.
Conky can display this info either as text, or using simple progress bars and graph widgets, with different fonts and colours.
This howto is about how to have several conky sessions running, at the same time, on your desktop at startup.
In #! Crunchbang you should allready have conky up and running, so no install is needed.
It's assumed that you allready know how to edit your ~/.conkyrc and how to use the different variables and settings.
The first thing you have to do is to have some thoughts about the following:
1). This is defined in your startup script.
2). This is defined in the .conkyrc for the specific widget.
3). This is also defined in the .conkyrc for the specific widget (see below).
In this example we want to have 4 conky widgets:
Create the directory where these .conkyrc should be placed
mkdir .conky touch .conkyrc_clock touch .conkyrc_sys touch .conkyrc_net touch .conkyrc_proc
Now edit the files to suit your needs, you can find more information on the conky homepage
To place the conky widgets can be a bit tricky, but this tip should help.
In your .conkyrc_XXX you should have these settings:
maximum_width 130 gap_x 10 gap_y 30
maximum_width is the the width of the widget
gap_x is the distance from the right edge of your screen
gap_y is the distance from the top edge of your screen
The height of the widget is calculated automatically based on the content of your .conkyrc_XXX
The command xwininfo could be usefull, but the geometry string from these outputs and the gap_ settings does not always match.
Now when everything is in place you would like to have it all started when you log in, this is the script that makes it all happen.
Open your preferred editor
$EDITOR conky_start
Put this in the file
#!/bin/bash conky -c ~/.conky/.conkyrc_clock & conky -c ~/.conky/.conkyrc_sys & conky -c ~/.conky/.conkyrc_net & conky -c ~/.conky/.conkyrc_proc
Yes, the last line must not have a trailing &
Make the file executable
chmod +x conky_start
And put the file in your $PATH
The only thing left to do is to have these lines in the bottom of your ~/.config/openbox/autostart.sh
# Launch Conky # conky & (sleep 2s && conky_start) &
These links should help you make some customized conky widgets