Conky

I recently discovered the coolness of a program called Conky. If you haven't heard of it, go to Conky's Sourceforge page. Essentially it is a system monitor that you can configure to show pretty much anything. The only thing I wish it could do at this point is cook me some eggs in the morning, but I digress.

If you just start up Conky after an install on Gentoo, it isn't much to look at. In fact, I had discounted this program before. This time around, it occurred to me that "Parted Magic", a Live CD distro for partition work, uses Conky and made it look pretty nice. I took the Conky configuration from Parted Magic and made my own changes. In the end, I have a nice monitor that let's me know pretty much everything I care to know about my machine at any given time.


You can find all of the available configuration options and variables in the documentation for Conky.
To make your life easier, here is my configuration.

# set to yes if you want Conky to be forked in the background
background yes

# X font when Xft is disabled, you can pick one with program xfontsel
#font 5x7
#font 6x10
font 7x13
#font 8x13
#font 9x15
#font *mintsmild.se*
#font -*-*-*-*-*-*-34-*-*-*-*-*-*-*

# Use Xft?
use_xft yes

# Xft font when Xft is enabled
xftfont Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:size=9

# Text alpha when using Xft
xftalpha 0.8

# Print everything to stdout?
# out_to_console no

# Print everything to console?
# out_to_console no

# Update interval in seconds
update_interval 2.5

# This is the number of times Conky will update before quitting.
# Set to zero to run forever.
total_run_times 0

#own_window_title Parted Magic - conky

# Create own window instead of using desktop (required in nautilus)
own_window yes

# If own_window is yes, you may use type normal, desktop or override
own_window_type normal

# Use pseudo transparency with own_window?
own_window_transparent yes

# If own_window_transparent is set to no, you can set the background colour here
own_window_colour black

# If own_window is yes, these window manager hints may be used
own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager
#own_window_hints below,skip_taskbar,skip_pager

# Use double buffering (reduces flicker, may not work for everyone)
double_buffer yes

# Minimum size of text area
minimum_size 280 5

# Draw shades?
draw_shades yes

# Draw outlines?
draw_outline no

# Draw borders around text
draw_borders no

# Draw borders around graphs
draw_graph_borders yes

# Stippled borders?
stippled_borders 4

# border margins
border_margin 4

# border width
border_width 1

# Default colors and also border colors
default_color white
default_shade_color black
default_outline_color black

# Text alignment, other possible values are commented
#alignment top_left
alignment top_right
#alignment bottom_left
#alignment bottom_right
#alignment none

# Gap between borders of screen and text
# same thing as passing -x at command line
gap_x 15
gap_y 15

# Subtract file system buffers from used memory?
no_buffers yes

# set to yes if you want all text to be in uppercase
uppercase no

# number of cpu samples to average
# set to 1 to disable averaging
cpu_avg_samples 2

# number of net samples to average
# set to 1 to disable averaging
net_avg_samples 2

# Force UTF8? note that UTF8 support required XFT
override_utf8_locale no

# Add spaces to keep things from moving about?  This only affects certain objects.
use_spacer none

TEXT
${color goldenrod}Hostname: $nodename
${color goldenrod}Linux Kernel: $kernel
${color goldenrod}CPU Details:  $machine, $freq(MHz)
${color}CPU History:  ${color darkgreen}${cpugraph 30,0 0000ff 00ff00}
${color}CPU Usage:${color magenta2} $cpu% ${cpubar 11,0}

${color}RAM Usage:${color DeepSkyBlue1} $mem ($memperc%) ${membar 11,0}
${color}Available RAM:${color DeepSkyBlue1} $memmax

${color}Battery Status:${color DeepSkyBlue1} $battery
${color}Battery Time:${color DeepSkyBlue1} $battery_time

${color}Free Space on /:${color DeepSkyBlue1} ${fs_free /} (${fs_free_perc /}%)

${color}System Load Avg:${color DeepSkyBlue1} ${loadavg}
${color}Disk I/O:${color DeepSkyBlue1} ${diskio /dev/sda}