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Conky is free software and runs in X on Linux and BSD. Originally a fork of Torsmo, Conky 1 was under a BSD license. Conky 2 (under development) is GPL, as is most of Conky 1.

Since its inception, Conky has changed significantly from its predecessor, while maintaining simplicity and configurability. Conky can display just about anything, either on your root desktop or in its own window. Not only does Conky have many built-in objects, it can also display just about any piece of information by using scripts and other external programs.

Conky provide us a complete system information, including your cpu usage, process, top process, memory, swap, filesystems, and more! I like it’s simplicity, and the user interface. You can enable the windowed mode, text mode or with progress bar.

Conky has more than 250 built in objects, including support for:
* A plethora of OS stats (uname, uptime, CPU usage, mem usage, disk usage, “top” like process stats, and
* Network monitoring, just to name a few)
* Built in IMAP and POP3 support
* Built in support for many popular music players (MPD, XMMS2, BMPx, Audacious)
* … and much much more.

Installation:

For Ubuntu users, you can simply click on this apt-url to perform the automatic installation.
Or simply type in terminal:

sudo apt-get install conky

To enable conky after that, you need to type conky after pressing alt+f2 or just simply type conky in terminal, and here is the screenshot:

There’s another option to display Conky, to display conky like this:

You just simply need to download this file, and rename it as “.conkyrc” (without quotation marks) . And then replace it in your home folder.

Other Linux Distros:

Gentoo

Have no fear, Conky is in portage. You can install it with:

# emerge app-admin/conky

using Paludis:

# paludis -i app-admin/conky

Arch

Conky is available in pacman:

# pacman -S conky

Slackware/Zenwalk

A build of Conky for Slackware/Zenwalk was kindly contributed by Stijn Segers of Zenwalk. The package can be found on the sourceforge download page. You can find a full list of packages at http://users.telenet.be/saranno.famosi/Packages/.

FreeBSD

Conky is avaible in FreeBSD ports, check FreshPorts for details.

Foresight

For Foresight Linux or any other rPath-based distro:

# conary update conky=cookingwithroids.rpath.org@cwr:all

Compiling from source

You’ll need the X11 development libraries, version 6.8.2 or later. package name is probably libx11-dev

$ ./configure
$ make
# make install

The last step is optional, if you don’t do this, the conky executable will be in src/.

And as simple as that, you can enjoy conky in your Linux desktop .

Other Distros, Software, Ubuntu