Conky is a terribly light system monitor for
X
Apart from its
home, a good starting page is
this one, and a helpful tutorial on how to arrange it on your desktop is
here, though some further tricks are needed to have it working on your
Plasma desktop enjoying transparencies (I surfed a while throughout the Web, so I regret I cannot mention all the pages, well not that many, I took hints from).
With
OpenSUSE there is no need to hunt for the right package, download and install it, just open
Yast2, type '
conky' and check it for installation.
Then copy the
conky.conf file in
/etc/conky/ to your home as
.conkyrc and start editing it.
Initiate from the settings suggested
in this page, but be sure to make these further changes in order to have conky stuck on your desktop, transparent and below all other windows
own_window yes
own_window_class conky-semi
own_window_type desktop
own_window_argb_visual yes
particularly, the last one.
To have your
Google Calendar within
Conky, install
gcalcli from
Yast2; the
gcalcli how-to wiki page is
here.
More work is needed if you want also some weather information through the
ConkyForecast python script.
- Download the tarball from here;
- Unpack it somewhere;
- Rename its src folder as conkyforecast and give running permissions (755) to the conkyForecast script;
- Copy conkyForecast.config to your home as .conkyForecast.config;
- Now you need root privileges to move the conkyforecast folder to /usr/share/.
If your desktop is set to wallpaper slideshow, it would be smart to set shades to improve readability
default_outline_color white
default_shade_color black
draw_shades yes
What is still uncomfortable is enabling / disabling and external display during a session (I do it quite frequently):
Conky runs in a window and as such is managed, therefore it could requires to kill
Conky and restart it.
Whether you want to share the monitor with more computers, move
.conkyrc,
.conkyForecast.config, and
.gcalclirc somewhere in your
Dropbox account (remember to link them back in your home).
I have a Linux Mint box to test it, therefore I followed literally the Ubuntu steps for installation:
- sudo apt-get install conky
- gksu gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
- where the line deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/m-buck/ubuntu hardy main has been added;
- sudo apt-get update
- sudo apt-get install conkyemail conkyforecast
- sudo apt-get gcalcli
Once all the software is on-board, link
.conkyrc,
.conkyForecast.config, and
.gcalclirc from the
Dropbox folder to the home, and it works.
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