File: conky-howto.xml

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<?xml version='1.0' encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE guide SYSTEM "http://www.gentoo.org/dtd/guide.dtd">
<guide link="/doc/en/conky-howto.xml">
    <title>Gentoo Linux Conky Howto</title>
    <author title="Author">
        <mail link="admin@sdesign.us">Bill Woodford</mail>
    </author>
    <author title="Editor">
        <mail link="brenden@diddyinc.com">Brenden Matthews</mail>
    </author>
    <abstract>This document describes how to install and configure the system
    monitor known as Conky.</abstract>
    <!-- The content of this document is licensed under the CC-BY-SA license -->
    <!-- See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5 -->
    <license />
    <version>1.0</version>
    <date>2006-02-22</date>
    <chapter>
        <title>Background</title>
        <section>
            <title>Introduction to Conky</title>
            <body>
                <p>So you have a Gentoo machine, and have already learned 30
                different commands to monitor different aspects of what your
                computer is doing at the current moment. What do you do from
                here? Isn't there an easier way to monitor system performance
                and see what its doing, as well as the resources its using to
                perform all those tasks? This is what a system monitor, such
                as Conky, provides.</p>
            </body>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>What it does</title>
            <body>
                <p>Unlike other system monitors such as top, Conky can run as
                a window in an X session, or by drawing to the root window
                (there is also an option to have Conky display information to
                stdout, but we won't discuss that here). It displays the
                information it has gathered through the use of both text,
                progress bars, and graphs. Also unlike top, the way it is
                formatted is completely user-configurable. In addition to
                monitoring the system itself, Conky can also give you
                information about several music players (such as XMMS,
                Music Player Daemon, and Audacious Media Player), tell you how
                many new messages are in your mail spool, and plenty more. If
                the functionality you require isn't in Conky yet, it is a
                simple matter of writing a script to get the information you
                would like - some examples of this, which have already been
                done are RSS feeds, POP3 e-mail message count, local weather,
                boinc status, and even the status of portage.</p>
            </body>
        </section>
    </chapter>
    <chapter>
        <title>Installing Conky</title>
        <section>
            <title>Base install</title>
            <body>
                <p>Gentoo provides an ebuild to quickly and easily install
                Conky. Pay particular attention to the the USE flags. You'll
                most likely want X11 support (
                <c>X</c>), and make sure you select the USE flags for any
                music players (other than MPD) which you want. XMMS (
                <c>xmms</c>), Audacious (
                <c>audacious</c>),
                or XMMS support via the xmms-infopipe plugin (
                <c>infopipe</c>).</p>
                <pre caption="/etc/portage/package.use">
<comment># Example line to append to /etc/portage/package.use if you don't
want the
default USE flags.</comment>
<i>app-admin/conky xmms infopipe -ipv6</i>
</pre>
                <p>In addition, the
                <c>truetype</c>USE flag compiles support for TrueType fonts
                with the use of Xft. Most users will want this as well.</p>
                <p>Once you have your USE flags correctly set up, it's time to
                install Conky!</p>
                <pre caption="Installing Conky">
<i>emerge -av conky</i>
</pre>
                <p>You can test Conky to see how it will look by running the
                command
                <c>conky</c>in a terminal. This will likely give you a good
                reference to how it will look and what you want to change, add
                or even remove.</p>
                <pre caption="Running Conky for the first time">
$
<i>conky</i>
</pre>
                <p>Once you have an idea of how Conky looks, you can now move
                on to configuring it!</p>
            </body>
        </section>
        <section>
            <title>Configuring Conky</title>
            <body>
                <p>By default, Conky will look for a configuration file in the
                users home directory located at
                <path>~/.config/conky/conky.conf</path>This file contains all
                the configuration options, and the static text, colors and
                other variables which control what data is shown to the user.
                Conky also provides a great sample configuration, located at
                <path>
                /usr/share/doc/conky-version/Conkyrc.sample.gz</path>Make sure
                to replace "version" with the specific version of Conky you
                have installed.</p>
                <pre caption="Copying the sample configuration to your home directory">
$
<i>mkdir -p ~/.config/conky</i>
$
<i>zcat /usr/share/conky-1.6.0/conkyrc.sample.gz &gt;&gt;
~/.config/conky/conky.conf</i>
</pre>
                <note>Make sure to replace "1.6.0" with the specific version
                of Conky you have installed.</note>
                <p>Now, open up the sample configuration in the text editor of
                your choice. You may notice that there are two seperate
                sections of the configuration file. The first section of the
                file, contains the programs configuration options and controls
                how it acts. This includes things such as the
                <c>update_interval</c>, or how often Conky will update the
                information on the screen. The second section contains the
                actual text, graphs, and variables which are rendered on the
                screen. This includes things such as the system uptime (
                <c>$uptime</c>), cpu usage (
                <c>$cpu</c>) and anything else you want to be shown. The first
                section of the file starts right from the beginning, the
                second section is comprised of everything after the line which
                says "
                <c>TEXT</c>". Comments in the file start with
                <c>#</c>, but keep in mind that even if a line is commented
                out in the second section of the file, the text will still be
                rendered to the screen.</p>
                <p>Lists of all the available configuration options and
                variables are kept at
                <uri>
                http://conky.sourceforge.net/config_settings.html</uri>and
                <uri>http://conky.sourceforge.net/variables.html</uri>. Also,
                there's a few great sample configurations and screenshots of
                working configurations at
                <uri>http://conky.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html</uri>.</p>
            </body>
        </section>
    </chapter>
    <chapter>
        <title>Extending Conky</title>
        <section>
            <title>Beyond the built-in variables</title>
            <body>
                <p>So you've gotten this far, and have scoured the Conky
                documentation for that extra variable which Conky just doesn't
                seem to have... You're in luck! Conky provides several
                variables for just this reason!
                <c>$exec</c>Will run a command every time Conky updates,
                <c>$execi</c>will run a command at a specified interval and
                <c>$texeci</c>will run a command in it's own thread at a
                specified interval.</p>
                <pre caption="Scripting examples">
<i>${exec grep 'sudo' /var/log/messages | tail -n 4}</i>
<i>${execi 30 ~/scripts/emerge-status.sh</i>
<i>${texeci 600 ~/scripts/gmail.pl}</i>
</pre>
                <note>While any command which works in a command shell will
                work in any of these variables, it is important to keep in
                mind that the commands must exit. This means that commands
                like
                <c>tail -f</c>which keep running will NOT work
                properly.</note>
            </body>
        </section>
    </chapter>
</guide>