About Conky

Conky is a light-weight system monitor for X, that displays any information on your desktop.  Conky is licensed under the GPL and runs on Linux and BSD.

Conky is much like making a desktop gadget. It creates a little window, which can be disguised as being transparent. People use Conky to draw various things, often involving computer information such as how much battery on the laptop is remaining or what time it is. It can make for a nice decoration.

This page will give various info on setting up and using Conky.

Installing Conky

The conky-all package has everything you need to get going with Conky.

From Terminal

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install conky-all

From Synaptic Package Manager

Search for and install the conky-all package.

Auto-starting Conky

Once you have your Conky files setup and in place, you will probably want your Conky configuration to run when you start up.

Read up on making a personal application launcher, which has instructions on how to create a .desktop file and then run that file at startup.

Conky Transparency

Is your Conky not running with a transparent background?  Well, there’s a number of ways you can fix that.

Ecomorph

After enabling Ecomorph, you can run Conky transparently.

Adjusting Config for Transparency

If your Conky configuration is not transparent, you may need to adjust its code to have the following:

own_window yes
own_window_argb_value 0
own_window_argb_visual true
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_type desktop


It is important that other settings do not conflict with these. For instance, a line written as
own_window_argb_visual false

should be removed or commented out with a #.
# own_window_argb_visual false

Removing Drop Shadow

Ecomorph naturally adds shadows to windows, but that might not be wanted for Conky.  This can be fixed though.

In the Ecomorph configuration (Menu > Settings > Ecomorph), go to Drop Shadow on the left hand pane. On the right hand pane, for the normal shadow (top half), edit that line to include:

& !(class=Conky)

For example:

(type=any & !(type=dropdownmenu|popupmenu) & !(class=Conky))

Root Desktop

Conky draws on the root desktop.  If you change the background of the root desktop to match your actual desktop’s background, then it’ll blend in perfectly.

Instructions on this coming soon.