How to display your system info on your Linux desktop

This tutorial will guide you in downloading, installing and setting up conky, a free, light-weight system monitor for X11 that displays system information on your desktop. And it’s also worth noting that the title is slightly misleading, conky also works in various BSD and X11 supported operating systems as well.

Conky can be used to display everything from your CPU and memory usage to the currently playing file in your media player. It can check your POP email account, CPU temperature, battery percentage remaining, network usage and much, much more.

Installing Conky

Debian/Ubuntu

Open a terminal and enter:

sudo apt-get install conky

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Gentoo

Open a terminal and enter:

emerge app-admin/conky

Compiling from source

You’ll need the X11 development libraries, version 6.8.2 or later.

Download conky from http://conky.sourceforge.net/, uncompress it and then from a terminal run the commands (from inside the conky folder):

./configure
make
make install

The last step is optional, if you don’t do this, the conky executable will be in src/

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Configuring Conky

The first time you run Conky a blank .conkyrc file will be created in your home folder. Rather than work from an empty configuration file, you can download this example (default) conky configuration file. Save it in your home folder and rename it to .conkyrc

Alternately, you can use my somewhat customized .conkyrc file (to download right click the previous link and choose “Save As”). Save the file to your home folder and then rename it to .conkyrc

Using my customized .conkyrc file conky will look something like the screenshot below (transparent, borderless, upper-right corner of your screen with mostly the default resources being displayed).

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There are dozens, possibly hundreds, of variables and config file settings. You may want to run conky once before you jump into adding additional variables and options.

For Ubuntu users, when you do edit the .conkyrc file using the Text Editor, hold down the ctrl key and hit the letter h to display hidden files (files that start with .) That way you can select and open .conkyrc

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Running Conky

Depending on which OS you’re running conky on, locate the executable file and run it by entering ./conky &

If you’re an Ubuntu user you can launch conky by holding down the alt key and then hitting F2. Enter conky in the space provided and click Run