Conky is Cool

Conky is a tool used to display performance metrics of a Linux box in an active window or right on the background of the computer. If you’ve used Sysinternal’s BGInfo it’s kinda like that, but better because it updates in real time. It’s  very configurable, but usually looks something like this:

That’s a bit hard to read so here is an example of the kind of data it can provide:

The configuration for this is pretty easy on Centos.  Here’s how I did it:

yum install libX11-devel libXext-devel libXdamage-devel libXft-devel glib2-devel

* watch the wrap…that’s all 1 line

Then download conky here.  Expand this somewhere like /usr/bin or ~ and run:

• ./configure
• make
• make install

Now you need to make a file named .conkyrc and drop it in your home directory.  I used one I found online, but there are a ton of them available here with screenshots showing with they look like.

To start it under Gnome open a command line and type conky.  If that bothers you that it’s spawned from the window add this script to your machine (/usr/bin/startconky.sh and chmod it to 755) and put a link to it in your panel or on your desktop.

#!/bin/sh
# by: ??
# click to start, click to stop

if /sbin/pidof conky | grep [0-9] > /dev/null
then
  exec killall conky
else
  sleep 1
  conky
  exit
fi

*Note…script blatantly stolen from here.

Now when you click on the conky icon in your panel it will start and stop conky.

Pretty cool stuff.