Conky System Monitor For Fluxbox

[tcrroadie]

For those who do not know what Conky is, Conky is a light system monitor that can display a variety of information right on your desktop. Now this is not going to be a HowTo guide, like my previous post have been. I just wanted to share this tool and one of my conky configuration scripts with those users who are interested in keep taps on things such as CPU usage.

I like to use conky on my work laptop to help me keep taps on things such as CPU usage, CPU temp and battery life. At first I didn't see much use for it on my PS3 until a few days ago when my system slowed to a crawl after some web browsing. I checked my terminal and I had two instances of gtk-gnash running which floored my CPU. Ouch. So I figured I would set up Conky on my PS3 to help me keep tabs on things. And besides, I think it looks a little cool.

The Conky configuration script I wrote for my PS3 will display information for system architecture, uptime, CPU clock speed, CPU usage, and the current track being played by Audacious. It will display this information accross the top of your screen. Now, configuring conky is a manual affair. So if you want to change something such as text color or layout, you will need to edit your Conky configuration file using your text editor. There are many example configuration files for Conky out on the Web, so just do some Googling, if for example you want to learn how to write a .conkyrc script to display information for your network in a histogram style. This is what my conky layout looks like.



Alrighty then. Lets get conky installed. In your terminal as root run

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yum install conky

Next you will need to create the configuration file for conky called .conkyrc. By default, this file does not exist, so we will need to create it. We are going to use nano for this one to make sure that our code is formated properly. In your terminal run

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nano -w .conkyrc

And place this in it.

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# Conky script modified for use on SONY Playstation 3 running YDL 6, using screen mode for 720p televisions.
# Best used with Fluxbox Window Manager.
# Please feel free to modify to your own needs.
# Modified by tcrroadie (Kris S)   

# UBUNTU-CONKY
# A comprehensive conky script, configured for use on
# Ubuntu / Debian Gnome, without the need for any external scripts.
#
# Based on conky-jc and the default .conkyrc.
# INCLUDES:
# - tail of /var/log/messages
# - netstat connections to your computer
#
# -- Pengo (conky@pengo.us)
#

# Create own window instead of using desktop (required in nautilus)
#own_window yes
#own_window_type override
#own_window_transparent yes
#own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager

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

# fiddle with window
use_spacer yes
use_xft yes

# Update interval in seconds
update_interval 2.0

# Minimum size of window area
#  minimum_size 250 5

# Maximum width of window area
  maximum_width 1124

# Draw shades?
draw_shades no

# Text stuff
draw_outline no # amplifies text if yes
draw_borders no
#font monospace
uppercase no # set to yes if you want all text to be in uppercase

# Xft font when Xft is enabled
#xftfont Sans:size=8
#xftfont Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:size=8
xftfont Terminus:size=17
#xftfont Andale Mono-9
#xftfont Clean-8
#xftfont cubicfive10:pixelsize=8
#xftfont squaredance10:pixelsize=14
#xftfont swf!t_v02:pixelsize=10

# Text alpha when using Xft
xftalpha 1

# Stippled borders?
stippled_borders 3

# border margins
border_margin 9

# border width
border_width 5

# Default colors and also border colors, grey90 == #e5e5e5
default_color 302d2d

#own_window_colour brown
own_window_transparent yes

# Text alignment, other possible values are commented
# alignment top_left
#alignment top_right
#alignment bottom_left
#alignment bottom_right
 alignment top_middle


# Gap between borders of screen and text
gap_x 5
gap_y 1

# Stuff after 'TEXT' will be formatted on screen

# The following code is written for dark wallpapers (backgrounds). 
# Configured to display system type, system uptime, CPU clock speed, CPU load, Audacious music player (current song).
 
TEXT
${color a12525}System: ${color}${machine}  ${color a12525}Uptime: ${color}${uptime}  ${color a12525}CPU: ${color}${freq}MHz  ${color a12525}CPU Load: ${color}${cpu}% ${cpubar 15,100}  ${color a12525}Audacious: ${color}${audacious_title 32}




If you are running GDM on your system, you will need to change the text size to a smaller value or the text will be huge.

You can test this file from your terminal by running

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conky

To kill conky, just press ctrl+c on your keyboard. If you like, you can have conky running when you log into Fluxbox by adding conky to your .fluxbox/startup file. Just add

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conky &

[Digitalgenicide]

Very nice tcrroadie Thanks for the guide. I have been messing around with your conky file and i made a pretty nice setup. I really wish i knew how to add pictures to my posts.

# Conky script modified for use on SONY Playstation 3 running YDL 6, using screen mode for 720p televisions.
# Best used with Fluxbox Window Manager.
# Please feel free to modify to your own needs.
# Modified by tcrroadie (Kris S)

# UBUNTU-CONKY
# A comprehensive conky script, configured for use on
# Ubuntu / Debian Gnome, without the need for any external scripts.
#
# Based on conky-jc and the default .conkyrc.
# INCLUDES:
# - tail of /var/log/messages
# - netstat connections to your computer
#
# -- Pengo (conky@pengo.us)
#

# Create own window instead of using desktop (required in nautilus)
#own_window yes
#own_window_type override
#own_window_transparent yes
#own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager

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

# fiddle with window
use_spacer yes
use_xft yes

# Update interval in seconds
update_interval 2.0

# Minimum size of window area
# minimum_size 250 5

# Maximum width of window area
maximum_width 310

# Draw shades?
draw_shades no

# Text stuff
draw_outline no # amplifies text if yes
draw_borders no
#font monospace
uppercase no # set to yes if you want all text to be in uppercase

# Xft font when Xft is enabled
#xftfont Sans:size=8
#xftfont Bitstream Vera Sans Mono:size=8
xftfont Terminus:size=17
#xftfont Andale Mono-9
#xftfont Clean-8
#xftfont cubicfive10:pixelsize=8
#xftfont squaredance10:pixelsize=14
#xftfont swf!t_v02:pixelsize=10

# Text alpha when using Xft
xftalpha 1

[Digitalgenicide]

I almost forgot u'll might need my fonts to make it look right. If u havent allready, create a folder in your home directory and name it .fonts inside that folder make another folder named myfonts
next download the attachment and rename it radiof.ttf and place it in the newly created file. all the fonts are pretty common fonts so u might allready have them.

[oldPES]

The screen of Digitalgenicide shows RAM-usage, and the one of tcrroadie doesn't show that.

I would really appreciate if someone could enlighten me on this.

[juanito]

Have a look at the conky documentation at http://conky.sourceforge.net/documentation.html

[bonedome]

Hello
yeah if you google conkyrc you will find hundreds of examples.
I have this line at the end of mine

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${color black}RAM Usage:${color}$mem/$memmax($memperc%)


this shows on the screen

RAM Usage: 120MiB/224MiB(53%)

you can remove the brackets, have it just as a percentage, just memory used or change the / to "of" so it reads 120Mib of 224MiB
I'll see if I can post a screenshot, here ya go

4095105507_461a435b11.jpg (87.61 KiB) Viewed 19016 times

[oldPES]

Thanks guys, this is usefull for future members/googles/bingers.

[kalmaholic]

Hey guys this is a really neat tool that I would like to have set up on my YDL 6.1 for PS3. I'm having a problem though when Icopy the big block of code into .conkyrc and then write it out, and test it by entering conky into the terminal I get the following error.

[root@localhost ~]# conky
Conky: desktop window (60000a) is subwindow of root window (4c)
Conky: drawing to desktop window
Conky: drawing to double buffer
X Error of failed request: BadMatch (invalid parameter attributes)
Major opcode of failed request: 142 (DOUBLE-BUFFER)
Minor opcode of failed request: 1 (DBEAllocateBackBufferName)
Serial number of failed request: 126
Current serial number in output stream: 129

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[kalmaholic]

Never mind about my post earlier... problem solved I forgot to turn fluxbox on! ><<<

[exploitz]

This is probably a simple fix but im relatively new to the linux scene...

When I run

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yum install conky

i get this back:

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[root@ubuntups3 chase]# yum install conky
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up Install Process
Parsing package install arguments
Nothing to do


Is this telling me i've got conky installed already? Because if i do I cant seem to run it via terminal or any other means

[bonedome]

Hello
I don't think conky is in any of the repos anymore, I could be wrong but not home to check, try

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yum list conky

if it's not available you could try building from source

[exploitz]

Hello
I don't think conky is in any of the repos anymore, I could be wrong but not home to check, try

Code: Select all

yum list conky

if it's not available you could try building from source

Thanks ive been waiting for like 5 years for someone to answer.. ill try building it, but probably fail lol.

Ive been trying to build conky 1.8.0 since I posted here earlier.. to no avail.
I managed to get past ./configure after about 10 tries some troubleshooting but when I go to run make it leaves me this:

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[chase@ubuntups3 conky-1.8.0]$ make
Making all in src
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/chase/src/conky-1.8.0/src'
make  all-am
make[2]: Entering directory `/home/chase/src/conky-1.8.0/src'
gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -DSYSTEM_CONFIG_FILE=\"/usr/local/etc/conky/conky.conf\" -DPACKAGE_LIBDIR=\"/usr/local/lib/conky\"   -I/usr/include/freetype2   -I/usr/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/lib/glib-2.0/include   -Wall -W  -MT conky-conky.o -MD -MP -MF .deps/conky-conky.Tpo -c -o conky-conky.o `test -f 'conky.c' || echo './'`conky.c
conky.c: In function ‘main’:
conky.c:5932: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘inotify_init1’
conky.c:5932: error: ‘IN_NONBLOCK’ undeclared (first use in this function)
conky.c:5932: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
conky.c:5932: error: for each function it appears in.)
make[2]: *** [conky-conky.o] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/chase/src/conky-1.8.0/src'
make[1]: *** [all] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/chase/src/conky-1.8.0/src'
make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
[chase@ubuntups3 conky-1.8.0]$


Anyone help me out?

[juanito]

I built an earlier version of conky (1.72?) using ydl on a ps3 without problems, maybe you could try that?

[exploitz]

I built an earlier version of conky (1.72?) using ydl on a ps3 without problems, maybe you could try that?

Alright thanks, I thought maybe I just suck at compiling lol. Im a windows user.. but have no complaints about linux at all

EDIT: I just want to say. I love you.
I don't know why I didnt think of building a different version lol but thanks for letting me know. Works great! Now I just need a bitchin' .conkyrc

[xoeo]

Hello
I don't think conky is in any of the repos anymore, I could be wrong but not home to check, try

Code: Select all

yum list conky

if it's not available you could try building from source

Thanks ive been waiting for like 5 years for someone to answer.. ill try building it, but probably fail lol.

Ive been trying to build conky 1.8.0 since I posted here earlier.. to no avail.
I managed to get past ./configure after about 10 tries some troubleshooting but when I go to run make it leaves me this:

Code: Select all

[chase@ubuntups3 conky-1.8.0]$ make
Making all in src
make[1]: Entering directory `/home/chase/src/conky-1.8.0/src'
make  all-am
make[2]: Entering directory `/home/chase/src/conky-1.8.0/src'
gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H -I. -DSYSTEM_CONFIG_FILE=\"/usr/local/etc/conky/conky.conf\" -DPACKAGE_LIBDIR=\"/usr/local/lib/conky\"   -I/usr/include/freetype2   -I/usr/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/lib/glib-2.0/include   -Wall -W  -MT conky-conky.o -MD -MP -MF .deps/conky-conky.Tpo -c -o conky-conky.o `test -f 'conky.c' || echo './'`conky.c
conky.c: In function ‘main’:
conky.c:5932: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘inotify_init1’
conky.c:5932: error: ‘IN_NONBLOCK’ undeclared (first use in this function)
conky.c:5932: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
conky.c:5932: error: for each function it appears in.)
make[2]: *** [conky-conky.o] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/home/chase/src/conky-1.8.0/src'
make[1]: *** [all] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/chase/src/conky-1.8.0/src'
make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
[chase@ubuntups3 conky-1.8.0]$


Anyone help me out?

about make conky 1.8.0
conky.c
----------------
5932 - inotify_fd = inotify_init1(IN_NONBLOCK);
5932 + inotify_fd = inotify_init();
----------------------------------------------