Conky - Rediscovered

Hello everyone. I know it's been a long time, but I've pretty much forgotten about posting all together : ).


It was a very nice Friday morning when I decided (again) that I don't like my damn desktop (too boring), so I started looking for a new wallpaper. After about 20-30 minutes searching (I was reaaaaly slow and didn't know what I wanted) I got here http://lyx91.deviantart.com/art/Techno-wallpaper-60142158 and loved the way the artist made that overlay over the wallpaper. It bugged me for a while, but then I suddenly realized I should resurrect conky and try to integrate it with the wallpaper.


What is conky?
Conky is a lightweight system monitor for X. It uses configuration files to gather information about window placement, transparency, fonts and other display options and, of course, information about what is to be rendered. It provides a HUGE variable database to work with ranging from battery, CPU, RAM, Swap, time data, to information about current processes, network graphs, mpd and xmms2 support (and probably a few other music players) and it even has an EvE Online skill monitor which shows how long you have to wait for your current skill to be done (PS. I don't play EvE though I could make another post about it's awesomeness). And if that's not enough, it has a few commands to execute external programs and do whatever it wants with the output.


What did I do?
I started out nice and easy and added some data on screen about the time and basic system information (like kernel version, hostname, distribution, available updates...) and placed them around that circle in the top left corner.
Next, I placed some information about the CPU usage: some CPU graphs, RAM and Swap data and a top processes list sorted by both CPU and memory usage.


Then I got to the hard part. I wanted weather forecast displayed so I started looking for some scripts to do that. After a long and winding road, i got here, found this guy who had some really cool scripts designed for conky including one made for forecasting. It required registering with some weather website and setting up some data feed from there, so no cheap hacking involved, but the script was brilliant and used some conky templates to set up the layout.


The only other problem I faced was with displaying data about the current song in Rhythmbox. Again I had to find a script, but the same guy had one so I used that.


So, this is what came out of my bored morning. I hope you like it.

Now I'm looking fore some really cool Ubuntu theme to go with this. If anyone has any ideas, please leave a comment ^_^.

Enjoy, everyone!