65 replies to this topic

[ShaqARif]

not a beginner's question, but something for beginners as I imagine linux old hands are aware of conky already...

conky is a system monitoring program that can run on your desktop and give you all sorts of useful info. It is highly configurable, and is even able to display the output from any scripts that you have written yourself.

The conky homepage is at http://conky.sourceforge.net/.

For ideas on how to write your conky script, there are hundreds of examples (screenshots and .conkyrc scripts) here:
http://ubuntuforums....ad.php?t=281865

The variables that I have found most useful are:
${battery} - Shows the battery state, whether charging, discharging
${acpitemp} - Shows the internal temp
${wireless_essid <connection>} - Shows the ESSID. For this I have ${wireless_essid ath0} - amend according to your connection
${wireless_link_bar <connection>} - Shows the quality of the connection

I will put up my full conky script when I get home (my eee doesn't have internet connection at work).

Until then, happy conkying!!

[mrmot]

Nice tip. Thanks!

[3lj]

i have used conky with fluxbox, looks great

i'll post my scripts with screenshot aswell in a bit

[o2smartphone]

good information, now learning to alter the default look.

but first, I start it with conky, how do I stop it ?

Edited by o2smartphone, 04 January 2008 - 03:26 PM.

[ShaqARif]

Quote

good information, now learning to alter the default look.

but first, I start it with conky, how do I stop it ?

if in your .conkyrc you have a line which is something like:

background yes

then this will mean that conky is running in the background. when you type conky, and hit return, does the command prompt return? If it does, then your conky is running as a background process.

In this case, to kill it, you can do:

killall conky

this saves having to look up the process id using

ps -ef | grep conky

and killing that way.

[o2smartphone]

I type the word in the address bar rather than using terminal, so I do not have the luck to see the command prompt.
At last, I restart my eee :)

I can get rid of it by the line killall conky, but can I set hotkey for that ?

[ShaqARif]

don't know about setting a hotkey for it, but how often would you want to kill it anyway?
Why not keep it running in the background? It is very light on system resources (and can be made to be even lighter by setting the update_interval to a higher value).

[JerryF]

I really look forward to some sample conkyrc files, as I ( a total noob) have gotten it running, but haven't succeeded in getting it monitoring wireless or cpu temperature. So bring on those samples. :-)

thx.

[quagga]

I took Tristan Green's conkyrc from this post: http://ubuntuforums....&postcount=1007 and modified it to my liking and the eee.

Edit: Bah, preview distorts. Click here for screenshot: http://quaggaspace.o...e/eee-conky.png

And the conf file is here if anyone likes: http://quaggaspace.org/eee/conkyeee

Edit (another one): The conf file for the wireless is setup to use wlan0 as that is what the new madwifi-ng uses. If you're using this on the classic Xandros it is called ath0. Do a find and replace in your favorite text editor to switch them out.

In vi (the Very Intuitive editor) that would be a :s%/wlan0/ath0/g

Edited by quagga, 05 January 2008 - 12:29 AM.

[JerryF]

Thanks quagga.

I tried your conkyrc file and it looks good. But I still don't get cpu temp. It shows 0 degrees. For completeness, I am running my conky from the advanced desktop.

With your suggestion of changing wlan with ath, that got me basic info like my ip address, but the majority of the variables on the wireless section didn't work. I hope someone can suggest variable names that work with our xandros distro.

Thx
Jerry

Edited by JerryF, 05 January 2008 - 04:58 AM.

[JerryF]

Whoo-hoo! I got the temperature to read out once I added acpitemp to /etc/modules.

Thanks again,

Jerry

[quagga]

Hmm, the wireless thing does have me confused - I would have thought that would stay. But I did modify a version which was on the ubuntu forums and I'm running ubuntu on my eee so that might explain why it all works :).

Now on my athlon desktop its a bit odd as the temperature always reads 40C. I'm not sure I buy that. The athlon has different ways of measuring temp of the CPU core but I can't seem to get that to work.

[psic]

This looks cool, I use Conky on my desktop (gentoo linux). I think I'll try it out here, but to keep it simpler. Thanks for the info about the temperature readings!

[JerryF]

Nobody got any Conkyrc files to share?

I'd welcome seeing one that has the wireless settings working. I finally got the temp reading ok, but the majority of the wireless atributes don't work.

Thx..
Jerry

[psic]

I've just setup conky, working great. I'll share my config file (very simple, doesn't use much screen space) when I get home (in a cyber cafe at the moment), I'm just wondering how to start conky when KDE starts up. In Gentoo I have a small script that runs one or two things at startup, but I'm not sure what's the best way to go about it here in Xandros?

[ShaqARif]

Quote

Nobody got any Conkyrc files to share?

I'd welcome seeing one that has the wireless settings working. I finally got the temp reading ok, but the majority of the wireless atributes don't work.

Thx..
Jerry

.conkyrc files? More than you can shake a stick at over here...

http://ubuntuforums....ad.php?t=281865

Re. your wireless, are you using the correct device? On mine it's ath0, what are you using?

[o2smartphone]

I use ${wireless_essid ath0} it returns ${wireless_essid }, how is that ?

[ShaqARif]

Can't see anything wrong with the syntax there, can you put up your full .conkyrc, and may be we'll spot something awry?

I thing it's more likely a runaway string from earlier in the file.

[o2smartphone]

# .conkyrc    2008/01/09

#update intervals
update_interval 3.0

# Use xft
use_xft yes
xftfont Sans:style=normal:size=8

maximum_width 270
alignment top_right
default_color white

# not all text in uppercase
uppercase no

TEXT
$nodename - $sysname $kernel on $machine
$color $stippled_hr
${color lightgrey}Uptime:$color $uptime $alignr${color lightgrey}Load:$color $loadavg
${color lightgrey}CPU: $color ${freq} Mhz $alignr${color lightgrey} Usage:$color $cpu% 
$color${cpubar}
${color lightgrey}Battery: $color ${battery}
${color lightgrey}RAM Usage:$color $mem/$memmax - $memperc% ${membar}
$color $stippled_hr
${color lightgrey}Processes:$color $processes ($running_processes running)
$color $stippled_hr
${color lightgrey}ath0 Signal $color${linkstatus ath0}% $alignr$color${addr ath0}
$color${wireless_essid ath0} $alignr$color${wireless_link_bar ath0} 
${color lightgrey}eth0: $alignr$color${addr eth0}
${color lightgrey}Down:$color ${downspeed eth0} k/s $alignr${color lightgrey}Up:$color ${upspeed eth0} k/s
${color lightgrey}Temp: $color${acpitemp} C

Edited by o2smartphone, 09 January 2008 - 04:31 PM.

[ShaqARif]

Really can't see anything wrong with that. What version of conky are you running? If it's an older version, then it may be that those variables are not available in that version.

Do conky -v, and see what that comes up with, if it's not 1.4.9, try upgrading.

As an aside, 'killall -SIGUSR1 conky' reloads your .conkyrc file, saves having to kill and restart conky each time.

One other thing that might be worth trying - put the problem variable in another part of the file, say just after the 'TEXT' header, to see if it gets picked up there.

E.g. replace

TEXT
$nodename - $sysname $kernel on $machine

with

TEXT
${wireless_essid ath0}
$nodename - $sysname $kernel on $machine

and see if that works.

Edited by ShaqARif, 09 January 2008 - 06:05 PM.