Here is a new conky setup I've put together.
Being that I've recently started transitioning my machines to XFCE from OpenBox, I quickly found out that my typical conkys didn't look quite right in XFCE. This is due to the compositor in XFCE not showing transparent backgrounds in conky with the 'own_window_transparent' setting, requiring the 'own_window_argb_visual' and 'own_window_argb_value' settings instead. The argb settings are problematic in conky when you have images in it as it causes the images to have some odd transparencies added to them. Either way, my setups like my LED Sidebar just end up looking like crap. :/
But, this really isn't a problem for a conky hackin' addict like myself. The majority of the credit for this setup goes to londonali1010 as all I did was manipulate her code. :)
On EeePC:
On laptop (resolution 1024x768) 
Download archive
Click the following links if you want to take a look at the individual files.
conkyrc
sidebar.lua
Here's how to set this up (from the included README file):
Set up:
1. If it doesn't exist, create folder at ~/.config/conky
2. Extract archive in newly created conky folder. Path to the files should be:
/home/$USER/.config/conky/cairosidebar/
3. This setup uses the 'Droid Sans' and 'OpenLogos' fonts. If you don't have
them installed already, they are included in the fonts folder. Otherwise,
they can be downloaded from
http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fonts/Droid-Sans
http://www.dafont.com/openlogos.font
4. As downloaded, this setup assumes that 'cpu0' 'BAT0' 'wlan0' and
'hwmon temp 1' are your interfaces. If your system is different, edit the
lua as needed at
/home/$USER/.config/conky/cairosidebar/sidebar.lua
5. This setup is 180px wide by 568px tall. It is configured to be centered on
my netbook (1024x600) from top to bottom, with using a vertical panel. If
you use a horizontal panel, you may need to adjust the 'gap_y' setting the
the main config at
/home/$USER/.config/conky/cairosidebar/conkyrc
Make any other edits to the two files as needed.
6. Being developed on Debian systems, the available updates count is determined
with the command
aptitude search '~U' | wc -l | tail
If there is a similar command for non-apt based systems, I am unaware of
what it is. Edit or remove from both the conkyrc and the lua as needed.
This setup will only run the aptitude command once a day while the conky is
running. It writes the output of the command to a text file located
/home/$USER/.config/conky/cairosidebar/upd
that is then read by the lua script.
7. Start the sidebar with
conky -qc /home/$USER/.config/conky/cairosidebar/conkyrc &
EDIT: If you are using Arch, you may want to check this link for a version of the OpenLogos font with the current Arch logo. ;)
Comments
thank you, very nice.
thank you, very nice. i'm generally a fan of more minimal conkies but this is really good. on debian/awesome wm, i had to drop own_window_argb's and go for own_window_transparent to get transparency though.
Thanks istok.
Thanks istok. I’ve had conkies of all sorts, super minimal to crazy. This one feels to be a decent balance to me. ;)
Didn’t anyone ever tell you
Didn’t anyone ever tell you that “Best Viewed With ” went out with the proverbial dinosaur and really has no place on the modern world wide web? Nice conky by thumbs down for the site.
meh.
@JDM
meh.
All I’ll say is come back next week(ish) after I’ve moved to Drupal and I no longer care if people visit my site with crap browsers (i.e. IE). :P
I really like this sidebar,
I really like this sidebar, I'm new to linux tho and am using fedora. It seems that fedora uses eth0 for wireless and when I change the lua to reflect this, the % for wireless doesn't work, any ideas on how to get it working?
A few questions.
It's been a few months since I ran Fedora (was Fedora 15) but, from what I remember the wifi was still on wlan0. It was the wired connection that changed from eth0 in F15.
So, it's not that I don't believe you but, can you verify your wireless is connected to eth0. The commands
and
can all help you see this, in case you don't already these commands.
Nice! Your new conky setup
Nice! Your new conky setup looks really nice.
I sometimes give conky a try, when I see such configurations, but then feel like I am betraying KDE so switch back to it's own widgets :)
I love conky
I've never run KDE for very long so I can't really say much about it's widgets. Conky is quite true to the Linux spirit in that you can customize it to whatever you want. Which is why Conky is always one of the first programs I install on a fresh OS install.
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