The other day I added a new monitor to my desktop. I write a lot of code, and it is very useful having a monitor in portrait orientation (vertical) for doing that. Because I now had a taller screen, I moved my conky display over to that screen and added a bit more information to it. While I was at it, I added some new color to it. After I was finished I tweeted a picture and had a couple of people ask me for the conkyrc for it. Unfortunately my conky isn’t just a “drop in this config and call it done” type deal. If you know what you are doing with conky and want to set it up, follow the read more link and check it out!

First, lets start with a picture of what it looks like:

In order to set this up, you will need some fonts for the icons, there is an LUA script for drawing the background, and then finally there is the .conkyrc to tie it all together. I have a tarball with everything that you need here: conkyscripts.tar.gz. I would recommend extracting it into your home folder. The path to it all should be ~/conkyscripts/ if you extracted it right. You can technically put it anywhere, but you will need to tweak the .conkyrc if you put them somewhere else.

Inside that tar file there are three fonts in zip files, you will need to install those fonts for the icons to work. There is also an LUA script that handles drawing the smoked background behind the conky display, that greatly increases the readability when you have a desktop background that is anything other than a solid color.

You will want to copy or move the .conkyrc into your home folder (~/.conkyrc) in order for conky to load it by default when you start conky.

The colors in the .conkyrc are handled through color defines, you will find a section in the .conkyrc like this:

# define a few colors for use below
color1 000099
color2 0044ee
color3 000066

You can tweak those 3 lines, giving it hex color values (same as what websites use) to adjust the whole color scheme easily.

Some parts of the .conkyrc are geared towards an Ubuntu system (namely the System Updates line)

The hard drive temperature monitoring relies on the hddtemp package being installed. After you install hddtemp you will want to run the following:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure hddtemp

and answer yes to the question on if it should be installed SUID root, all of the other questions, just go with the defaults.

There may be some other tweaks that you need to make to get it working perfectly on your system, but if you are conky hardcore, you should be able to get it all up and running pretty easily with this information.