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 &