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Conky is a free software system monitor for the X Window System. It is available for Linux, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD.<ref name="homepage">Conky homepage on SourceForge.net</ref> Conky is highly configurable<ref name="Popov">Expert's guide to configuring Conky by Dmitri Popov on Linux.com</ref><ref name="Stamper">Conky: highly configurable system monitor for X by Casey Stamper on Debian.net</ref><ref name="Wieseler">GKrellM vs. Conky by Sebastian Wieseler</ref> and is able to monitor many system variables including the status of the CPU, memory, swap space, disk storage, temperatures, processes, network interfaces, battery power, system messages, e-mail inboxes, Arch Linux updates, many popular music players (MPD, XMMS2, BMPx, Audacious), and much more.<ref name="docs">Conky documentation</ref> Unlike system monitors that use high-level widget toolkits to render their information, Conky is drawn directly in an X window. This allows it to consume relatively fewer system resources when configured similarly.<ref name="mulander">conky review by mulander</ref><ref name="Sharma">CLI Magic: Lightweight Conky is a system monitor powerhouse by Shashank Sharma on Linux.com</ref>

Conky has gained a strong following among many Linux and BSD enthusiasts, and was hailed as "one of the best maintained, and definitely one of the most useful, programs in the world of open source" according to Jan Rähm in a March 2009 article in Linux Magazine.

History

Conky is a fork of torsmo, a system monitor that is no longer maintained.<ref name="faq">Conky FAQ</ref> Torsmo, however, continues to be used in systems where applications that use minimal resources are preferred. Damn Small Linux, for example, runs torsmo in its desktop root window on the default installation of its Live CD.<ref name="torsmoOnDSL">Changelog of Damn Small Linux</ref> Conky derives its name from a character in the Canadian television programme Trailer Park Boys.

Common uses

While Conky is ideally suited for use as a system monitor, it can also be used to gather and display almost any type of information on the user's desktop (as well as in the command line, if one chooses). Conky can be extended with the Lua programming language, and uses its own functional-ish configuration file syntax. Conky features built-in support for several unrelated sources of information, but its biggest strength lies in its ability to be extended through scripting.

Conky has also been ported to devices such as the Nokia N900<ref name="n900">Nokia N900 Conky package</ref>, and can be ported to practically any system with GCC and an X11 implementation.

Users have created and distributed many customized scripts, demonstrating Conky's modularity and versatility in function and appearance. A thread on the Ubuntu forums has grown to over 1300 pages of users sharing their configurations.<ref name="rc_screens">Post your .conkyrc files w/ screenshots</ref><ref name="scripts">Conky scripts</ref><ref name="gmail">Conky Gmail Revisited</ref><ref name="howto">Howto: Get a beautiful Conky 1.4.2 setup</ref>

Usage example

A simple configuration for Conky which displays the time on a user's desktop is as follows:

update_interval 30

own_window yes
own_window_type desktop

use_xft yes
xftfont DejaVu Sans:size=14

alignment bottom_right

TEXT
${time %H:%M}

Default configuration file location is $HOME/.conkyrc or ${sysconfdir}/conky/conky.conf. On most systems, sysconfdir is /etc, and you can find the sample config file there (/etc/conky/conky.conf).<ref name="docs" />

Screenshots

• Arch Linux.png

  Conky on Arch Linux

• Conkyonubuntu.png

  Conky on Ubuntu

• Conkyubuntu.png

  Conky on Lucid Lynx

See also

• GKrellM
• System monitor

References

<references/>

External links

• Official website
• The Conky Wiki
• Template:Freshmeat