Conky

This simple tutorial shows how to install Conky Manager, a graphical front-end for Conky system monitor, in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

Conky is a light-weight system monitor for Linux Xorg, that displays CPU, GPU, and disk usage, network speed, weather, date and time and other information on desktop as widget.

And Conky Manager is a graphical tool that manages Conky config files. It provides options to start/stop, browse and edit Conky themes installed on the system.

Install Conky and Conky Manager 2 in Ubuntu 22.04:

The software was originally developed by by teejee2008 (Tony George), but not updated for a few years. And Conky Manager 2 takes the job to make it work on Ubuntu 18.04 and Ubuntu 20.04 since they are still default to X. In Ubuntu 22.04 I tested only using X windows. Not Wayland.

Besides building from the source, this Ubuntu PPA contains Conky manager packages for Ubuntu 18.04 and Ubuntu 20.04, and Conky Manager 2 for Ubuntu 20.04.

1.) Open terminal either by searching from overview screen or by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T on keyboard. When terminal opens, run command to add the PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tomtomtom/conky-manager

Type user password (no asterisk feedback) for sudo prompts and hit Enter to continue.

2.) Then install Conky as well as Conky Manager via commands:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install conky-manager2

Start and use Conky Manager 2:

Once installed, search for and launch Conky Manager app from the activities overview screen (or from start menu depends on your DE).

When the app opens, choose a widget or theme will show the preview in the bottom. Click on the ‘triangle‘ icon will start the selected widget or theme.

Conky widget may not well displayed by default. By clicking on the ‘spanner‘ icon will open the widget settings, allows to change its position, transparent, size and more.

Click ‘spanner’ icon to edit widget

Users may also click on the ‘pencil‘ icon to edit widget in config file. When file opens, use own_window_type desktop to remove window header bar and border if any. And set both own_window_argb_visual yes and own_window_argb_value 0 to enable transparent background.

Manual adaptation

Manual adaptation of Conky can be done by editing the config file ~/.concyrc

The configuration parameters can be foud here: Conky-settings

The config file by default is /etc/conky/conky.conf

To start with a customizing, create a .conkyrc file in ~/ using the following command,

touch ~/.conkyrc

Now every time you run conky, it will source config from conkyrc instead of the default conky.conf file.

To run conky from a custom config file, you can use the -c flag shown below

conky -c /path/to/config/file

Basic config options

Every conky config file has two parts. The first part controls how conky acts, i.e. how often it updates, alignment, colors, gaps, borders, etc. The second part starts after the line that says TEXT and it controls the actual content that is rendered on the screen i.e time, CPU temperature, kernel version, weather.

To know about all the inbuilt settings and variables in a precise manner, visit Conky Variable documentation and Conky Settings documentation.

While you can definitely write your own config from scratch, it’s usually easier to install a theme you like and then modify it over time. You can find conky themes on DotShare, Deviant Art, Gnome Looks, r/unixporn, and r/conkyporn just to name a few.

The theme I will be installing here is called Victor Conky. To install it I will be cloning its Github repository, then moving the victorConky folder to ~/.conky and moving all the fonts to ~/.fonts as shown below.

git clone https://github.com/gictorbit/victorconky

mkdir ~/.conky

mv victorconky/victorConky ~/.conky/

mv victorconky/fonts/* ~/.fonts

I adapted the linux small theme (victorconky/linuxsmall) see below:

Other conky themes that I like are

https://github.com/SZinedine/auzia-conky

https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/a2f0xd/gnome_custom_thinkpad_conky_configuration/

https://github.com/NoTranslation/Conky-Minimalism

https://www.reddit.com/r/Conkyporn/comments/mc1nzt/conky_screen/

Uninstall Conky, Conky Manager:

For any reason, you can easily remove the Ubuntu PPA by running the command below in terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:tomtomtom/conky-manager

If you want to remove Conky as well as Conky manager run command:

sudo apt remove --autoremove conky conky-manager2