Personalize your desktop with Conky

One of the most attractive features of Ubuntu and most GNU/Linux distros is their ability to be customized to suit each user. There are countless ways to customize our desktop, but in this post we will focus on a very useful as well as aesthetic widget. I'm talking about Conky, a widget that displays information such as, for example, the temperature of our processors, the strength of the Wi-Fi signal, the use of RAM, and many other characteristics.

What we're going to do here today is see how we can install Conky, how we can make it run automatically at the beginning of the session, and we will also see a few configurations for our Conky. we start.

As we have said, the beauty of Conky lies in the fact that through it we can access all kind of information; from emails or the use of the hard drive to the speed of the processors and the temperature of any of the devices on our team. But best of all, Conky allows us to see all this information on the desktop in a very aesthetic and visually pleasing way, through a widget that we can customize ourselves.

To begin with, if we don't have it installed, we have to install Conky. We can do this by running the following command in the terminal:

sudo apt install conky-all

Once installed, we can also install the «lm-sensors» program that will allow Conky to get the temperature of the devices of our PC. To do this, we execute this command in the terminal:

sudo apt install lm-sensors

Once we have installed these last two packages, we have to execute the following command so that “lm-sensors” detects all the devices on our PC:

sudo sensors-detect

At this point we already have Conky installed. Now we can write a script for Conky to run automatically at the start of each session. To do this, we have to create a text file in the / usr / bin folder that is called, for example, conky-start. To do so, we execute:

sudo gedit /usr/bin/conky-start

A text file will be opened in which we have to add the necessary code for Conky to run at the beginning of each session:

#!/bin/bash
sleep 10 && conky;

Now, we save the file and give it the execution permissions with:

sudo chmod a+x /usr/bin/conky-start

Now, we have to look for the "Startup Applications" application ("Startup Applications Preferences" if it does not appear in Spanish) to add the script that we have created previously. Once we have opened the application, a window like the following will appear:

We click on "Add" and a window like this will appear:

• Where it says Name we can put «Conky»
• Where it says Medals, we have to click on the "Browse" button and look for the script we have created called conky-start located inside the / usr / bin folder. As an alternative, we can directly write / usr / bin / conky-start.
• En Comment, we can add a small descriptive comment of the application that will be executed at the beginning.

Now Conky will run automatically every time you log in.

If the Conky widget still does not appear on the desktop, you just have to restart the system or directly run it from the terminal, typing the name of the program (conky). Once the widget appears on the desktop, it is likely that we will not like the appearance that it presents by default. For this we will show you how you can edit Conky's font to give it the appearance that you like the most.

Conky's source file is found as a hidden file inside our user's directory. This file has the name ".conkyrc". To see the hidden files and directories within a directory, we can do it graphically by pressing Ctrl + H or by executing the command:

ls -f

If the file ".conkyrc" does not appear, we have to create it ourselves with:

touch .conkyrc

Once we find it or believe it, we open it and there we will have the font that comes by default in our Conky or an empty file if we have created it ourselves. If you don't like that configuration, you can copy the font that I use here.

And as you can see, on the internet we can find thousands of configurations just by searching for "Conky configurations" or "Conky configurations" on Google. Once we find the one we like, we will only have to download the source and paste it into the ".conkyrc" file that we mentioned previously. Likewise, in Ubunlog We want to show you a list of the best configurations for Conky obtained from Devianart:

Conky, Conky, Conky by YesThisIsMe.

Conky Config by didi79

Conky Lua by despot77

My Conky Config by londonali1010

In addition to downloading configurations that are already written, we can create our own or modify existing ones, since Conky is Free Software. We can see Conky's source code at your GitHub page.

Hopefully this post has helped you customize your desktop a bit more. Now with Conky our desktop will have a much more pleasant appearance besides that we will be able to have at hand information that at some point can be very useful.