Day 18 – I'm Still Sorting… And Figuring out Conky

August 19th, 2009 | Author: VooDooStevie

I am still sorting out music. I said I had a large collection, didn’t I? Well now we are up to the T’s now. Hopefully I will be able to finish this up real soon. :O

Aside from sorting out the music files I decided to try out a little monitor program called Conky. The screenshot may be tough to view as a thumbnail so boost it up. Awww, Emma’s still playing with Daddy’s iPod… Oh wait this is about Conky, not Emma. Sorry was distracted.

Conky is a free, light-weight system monitor for X, that displays any information on your desktop. You can find more about it on their website.

Configuring this thing is a little tedious, but there is a lot of things you can do with it. I am considering a different layout than what I put here. This is basically a single line bar that shows info about my system, the Wifi connection (yeah the laptop is in my bedroom so the signal strength is kind of low there), My internal IP, and the Mail thing is a python script that checks one of my Gmail accounts.

I have a weather script that works but I can’t use it here on the single line. So I am going to need to figure out how to use multiple configs, or use a different layout. Here’s my current .conkyrc file:

#avoid flicker double_buffer yes


#own window to run simultanious 2 or more conkys

own_window  yes

own_window_transparent no

own_window_type normal

own_window_hints undecorate,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager
#borders

draw_borders no

border_margin 1
#shades

draw_shades no
#position

gap_x 0

gap_y 27

alignment top_left
#behaviour

update_interval 1
#colour

default_color  8f8f8f

#default_shade_color 000000

own_window_colour 262626
#font

use_xft yes

xftfont bauhaus:pixelsize=10
#to prevent window from moving

use_spacer no

minimum_size 1280 0
#mpd

mpd_host localhost

mpd_port 6600

TEXT ${voffset -1} CPU: ${color e0e0e0}${font}$cpu% ${cpubar 8,8}${color} | Mem: ${color e0e0e0}${font}${mem} ${color} | Battery: ${color e0e0e0}${font}${battery}:${battery_time}${color} | ${color} Up: ${color e0e0e0}${font}${uptime_short}${color} | ${color} Wifi: ${color e0e0e0}${font}${wireless_essid wlan0}: ${wireless_link_qual wlan0}%${color} IP: ${color e0e0e0}${font}${addr wlan0}${color} | ${color}Free: ${color e0e0e0}${font}${fs_free /} ${color} | Email: ${color e0e0e0}${execi 300 python ~/scripts/gmail.py}${color}

As you see it’s still a work in progress, but this originally was supposed to use a different weather script, but I couldn’t get that to work right at all.

Oh well, back to playing with it some more and sorting the music. Tomorrow. Possibly working with Audacity to get a podcast out this month.