One of the most attractive features of Ubuntu, and most GNU / Linux distros, is its own ability to be customized to the liking of each user. There are countless ways to customize our desktop, but in this post we will focus on a very useful widget at the same time aesthetic.
I’m talking about Conky, a widget that us shows information such as the temperature of our processors, the intensity of the Wi-Fi signal, the use of RAM, And many more features. In this post we will see how we can install Conky, how we can make it run automatically at login, and also see a few settings for our Conky. Let’s start.
As we have said, the beauty of Conky is that through it you can access all kinds of information. From emails or the use of your hard drive, to the speed of the processors or the temperature of any of the devices on your PC. But best of all, Conky lets you see all this information on your desktop in a very aesthetic and pleasing to the eye way, through a widget that you can customize yourself.
For starters, you should first we install Conky. We can do this by running the following command in the terminal:
sudo apt-get install Conky-all
Once installed, we can also install the “lm-sensors” program that will allow us to Conky get the temperature of our PC devices. To do this, run this command on the terminal:
sudo apt-get install lm-sensors
Once we have installed these last two packages, we must run the following command so that “lm-sensors” detects all devices on our PC with:
its sensors-detect
Well, at this point we already have Conky installed. Now we can write a script for Conky to be run automatically at the beginning of each session. To do this, we need to create a text file in the / usr / bin folder called, for example, Conky-start. To do this, we run:
sudo gedit / usr / bin / Conky-start
A text file will open in which we must add the code needed for Conky to run at the beginning of each session:
#! / Bin / bash
sleep 10 && Conky;
Now, we save the file and give it the execution permissions with:
its chmod to + x / usr / bin / Conky-start
Now, we need to look for the “Startup Apps” app, to add the script we created earlier. Once we have opened the application we will see a window like the following:
We give it to “Add” and a window like this will appear:
- on pose first name we can put “Conky”
- on pose order, We need to click on the “Browse” button and look for the script we created called Conky-start located inside the / usr / bin folder. Alternatively, we can type directly / usr / bin / Conky-start.
- en comments, We can add a small descriptive comment of the application that will run at startup.
Now Conky will run automatically every time you log in.
If you still can’t see the Conky widget on your desktop, just reboot the system or run it directly from the terminal by running the program’s own name (Conky). Once you see the widget shining on your desktop, you may not like the default look. That’s why we’ll teach you how you can edit the Conky font to give it the look you like best.
The Conky source file is found as a hidden file in our user’s directory. This file is named “.conkyrc”. To see the files and directories hidden inside a directory we can do it graphically by pressing Ctrl + H or executing the command:
ls -f
If the “.conkyrc” file does not appear, we must create it ourselves with:
touch .conkyrc
Once we find it or believe it, we open it and here we will have the source that comes by default in our Conky or an empty file in case we have created it ourselves. If you don’t like this setting, you can copy the font I use here.
And as you can see, on the internet we can find thousands of configurations by simply searching for “Conky configurations” or “Conky configurations” on Google. Once we find the one we like, we just have to download the source and paste it into the “.conkyrc” file we discussed earlier. Also, in Ubunlog we want to show you a list of the best settings for Conky obtained from DevianArt:
Conky, Conky, Conky of YesThisIsMe.
Conky Config per didi79
Conky Lua by despot77
My Conky Config for londonali1010
In addition to downloading configurations that are already written, we can create our own or modify existing ones, as Conky is Free Software. We can see the source code of Conky in your GitHub page.
We hope this post has helped you customize your desktop a little more. Now with Conky our desktop will look much nicer and we can have on hand information that at some point can be very useful.
