Nicholas Munson

Conky is a monitoring system that is both lightweight and very flexible for the X Window System.  It’s really easy to configure exactly what information you want displayed, and how it should be laid out.  Anything can be added: hard drive monitoring, CPU usage, network traffic, weather, music, email, and more.  I’ve found the resource usage to be negligent as well, with memory use hovering at 1.5mb.

I’ve tried to keep the setup simple and fit within a single column on my monitor.  This setup is used on my laptop which is displaying at 1366×768, so there’s about 700 vertical pixels of space when you take out space used up by the menu bar and padding. My setup was originally based off a post in the ubuntuforums.org thread which has many, many examples and great screenshots to go along with posts to get ideas.

If you’d like to get started with Conky, first install it:

sudo apt-get install conky

Then edit your .conkyrc file from your home directory:

vim ~/.conkyrc

Inside of that file you can configure Conky to your liking by using the code below or any other config file to get you started.  A screenshot of my setup is below along with the code.