CotM Update: $50 Amazon Gift Card up for Grabs
If you were in any doubt as to whether you should enter our festive Conky of the Month competition, your decision has now been made for you!
I am pleased to announce that in addition to the fame and glory that comes with being featured on the Conky Blog, we will also be offering a $50 Amazon Gift Card to this month's winner!
So go and get your Conky on...Enter by posting a comment on the original post.
TuxRadar’s Fortnightly Podcast Features Conky
The cover story on this month's Linux Format Magazine is "Make Linux look awesome!" So naturally I had to check it out! The feature explains some of the most common eye candy for Linux, including Compiz/Emerald, Cairo-Dock and some of the more customisable aspects of KDE and Gnome. I thought it was worth pointing out Conky to the author, Graham Morrison, since with the advent of Cairo and imlib2 support, savvy users can create desktops that rival Mac's GeekTool or Windows' Rainmeter.
And as a result, Graham has kindly featured Conky as his "Discovery of the Week" on the TuxRadar podcast!
If you would like to listen, you can download the podcast from the TuxRadar website. Further reading is on the Linux Format website, and if you are in the UK, I highly recommend picking up an issue of the print magazine!
Conky of the Month Competition!
Just in time for Christmas, I'm proud to announce the first official Conky of the Month (CotM) competition!
Starting today, each month the Conky Blog will hold a CotM competition, with submissions based on a theme. An overall winner will be selected based on the following three criteria:
- Visual Composition: This could be quite broad; if your Conky is purely functional, it might be the ease with which key system stats can be read. But if your Conky is designed to be eye candy, it might be the integration into your desktop or the visual completeness of your config.
- Conky Innovation: Have you used Conky in a new and wonderful way? Have you uncovered a rarely-seen but incredibly useful variable and implemented it? This is to recognise users who push the boundaries of what Conky can do, or seek ways to make their configs simpler.
- Adherence to the theme: Pretty self-explanatory. This will be how well your config expresses the theme of the month. This may be in the Conky itself, or in the entire desktop screenshot.
The winning Conky will be featured on our blog, with a little bio of the author!
This month's theme: Winter Holidays.
Deadline: 15th December.
To submit your Conky for consideration, please write a comment on this post, linking to a screenshot, preferably with details (.conkyrc and/or any scripts you've used). I would recommend that you either write a post on your own blog and link to that, or post on a forum and link to that (so that we can get your picture and details all at once). Alternately, you may wish to link to an image-hosting website like Picasa, Flickr or Imageshack (for your image) and post a separate link to something like pastebin for your configs. There is a private Conky pastebin available at conky.pastebin.com if you so desire.
The winner will be announced at the end of December.
And here's a screenie to get you going:
(Wallpaper from here.)
Happy Conkying!
The fine print: Please be sure that if you submit an image with wallpaper or other non-Conky visual elements showing (e.g. custom icons, fonts, etc.) that you are able to attribute as much of it as possible.
Conky in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala
Normally I like to keep this blog as distro-neutral as possible, but since lots of you are finding your way here via Googling for info on Conky in Ubuntu 9.10, I thought it prudent to reprint my quick guide to the packages that you will find in the Karmic repos, as they have changed so significantly from previous repository versions, and may be a tad confusing...
If you currently use the Conky package from the Jaunty repos, you'll be on version 1.6.1. The latest release is now 1.7.2, and is available in the Karmic repos.
However, there are now four versions of Conky in the Karmic repos! The four versions now available are:
- conky
- conky-all
- conky-cli
- conky-std
(First, I should point out that conky and conky-all are actually the same install...conky is in reality just a metapackage that will install the conky-all package. It is there to protect users currently using the repo conky package from upgrading and having things break. The other two packages are options for those who want to have a lighter or minimal Conky install...Further explanation below.)
From the package documentation, here is a brief explanation of the differences between the packages:
conky-cli is a basic package that can be useful in servers or piped with dzen2.
It includes the following support:
MPD, MOC, math, apcupsd and I/O stats
conky-std should be a good compromise for most users that do not need special features.
It includes the following support:
X11, XDamage, XDBE, Xft, MPD, MOC, math, hddtemp, portmon, wireless, ALSA mixer, apcupsd, I/O stats and lua
conky-all includes almost all of the available support:
X11, XDamage, XDBE, Xft, MPD, MOC, math, hddtemp, portmon, RSS, curl, Weather (METAR and XOAP), wireless, IBM, nvidia, eve-online, Imlib2, ALSA mixer, apcupsd, I/O stats, Lua and Lua bindings for the cairo and imlib2 libraries
It is highly advised that you upgrade to one of these packages as soon as you can, as the conky metapackage will eventually be removed.
Please feel free to post a comment here if you need any further explanation!
Q & A with Conky’s Main Dev, Brenden Matthews
I've been working with Conky now for the better part of a year, which, I'll admit, makes me a bit of a latecomer to this game! This was my first ever screenshot, and my first foray into the wonder that is desktop customisation with Conky:
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| From Screenshots |
If you know me at all, I think you'd agree that I have since fallen deep in love with Conky, so when Conky's main developer, Brenden Matthews, agreed to answer a few questions for me, I jumped at the chance!
Q: How did Conky get started? I know that it was a "fork of Torsmo", but I'm not too familiar with Torsmo. Were you originally involved in that project? And if not, how did you come to inherit it and move it on to become Conky?
Brenden Matthews: Conky started when I created a patch for torsmo (to add data smoothing, i.e. sample averaging such as cpu_avg_samples) and received no feedback after submitting it. I also noticed a lack of activity with the project in general, and impulsively decided to fork the project. In some ways Conky hasn't changed much since torsmo, but it has evolved to something much more rich and more capable.
Q: How did you decide on the name Conky? I know it's named after that doll on Trailer Park Boys, but is that it, it just sounded cool? Or does it hold some special significance to you?
BM: I've been a big fan of the TV show for many years, and Conky was one of my favourite characters.
Q: How many developers are there now, and where are they located?
BM: There are a huge number of contributors to Conky. Many of them are one-off contributors, but the majority of the work is done by people who make regular contributions (and have done so for years). I don't want to list off anyone in particular for fear of leaving someone out, but if anyone is curious you can always check the git log (at http://git.omp.am/?p=conky.git;a=shortlog).
Q: How do you decide which features to add to Conky (e.g. an $rss variable as opposed to just letting people use $exec curl)?
BM: Things just sort of evolve. Usually I don't write many new features myself, as I have long since added all the stuff I had a personal interest in. Most of the work I do now is bug fixes and adding new patches (which usually requires a bit of tweaking). Often people submit patches which either duplicate efforts or are very similar to existing components, so I have to separate the parts that I want from those I don't.
For example, with the $curl object, we already had RSS support (which used curl) and later somebody added weather support (which also used curl). So, I refactored the code so that the curl, RSS, and weather parts were all separate components, and thus wound up with the $curl object.
Q: Which is your favourite feature in Conky?
BM: I really like the built in IMAP client with IDLE support. It's also probably one of the most under-utilized features of Conky (though I admit it can be tricky to set up). Then again, I might be biased, since I wrote all that code.
For a little background, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMAP_IDLE
Q: What does the future of Conky look like? Or perhaps, what can we look forward to in Conky 2.0?
BM: Good question. There are some things about Conky I want to stay as they are, but some things need to change. For example, the current conkyrc syntax has to go, which probably won't make a lot of people happy (since their old configs won't work). I'm also quite happy about the Lua integration, but it still needs improvement. I want to expose more of the Conky internals via the Lua API, but this requires a bit of an internal Conky rewrite first. I'd also like to add some additional output and input options (i.e., drawing to multiple windows, receiving data from multiple remote Conky processes).
And of course, I'd like to add proper XRender support (which means proper transparency on composited X). Patches for this have been submitted already--I just haven't reviewed them yet. I need to stop slacking 
The concept of a "Conky 2.0" has been around for a while (and I even began rewriting the code from scratch at one point), but there really isn't anything Conky doesn't already do that I want it to do.
Q: What do you do for a day job? Assuming it's not Conky!
BM: Conky as a day job would certainly be nice--but no, I have a normal job like everyone else. I work for a small wireless software/service company in Berkeley, California. I write code and drink coffee most of the day, and in my spare time I enjoy cycling (I happen to live car-free) and being outdoors in general.
Q: Some of us users out there have started to use the term "CCCC", for the "Creative Collaborative Conky Community". What do you think of that epithet?
BM: I think it's great that I've been a part of something that people find useful (and possibly entertaining). Some of my coworkers even use Conky--but I don't think they know I'm responsible for it. The fact that a community has sprung up around Conky is great and I hope that I can continue to make Conky suck less with every release.
Feature Feature: Imlib2 + Cairo Bindings for Lua
It's been great to see more and more of you starting to use Lua/Cairo in Conky! But did you know that you can use imlib2 bindings in Lua as well? You can combine Cairo drawing and imlib2 image manipulation to get display a photo album, for instance:
The screenshot above was made using Cairo to draw the frame, and imlib2 to draw the image. If you'd like to take a peek at the code, you can download it here: photo_album.lua.tar.gz.
If you'd like to get started using imlib2 in your Lua scripts, I'd offer you the same advice as for Cairo...
First, have a read through the relevant documentation. Then grab some code and start tweaking!
I'm really impressed with the way I've seen Conky users all over the web collaborate to come up with some really great Cairo-drawn images...Now hopefully you'll have a go at imlib2 as well...
Happy Conkying!