Installing Conky in Ubuntu

Surely every Ubuntu user has heard of such a system monitor as Conky. It is a free and free open source system monitor for Linux family operating systems. The program allows you to display many system parameters: processor status, swap space, temperature, disk status, processes, network interfaces, network load.

The information is displayed on the desktop in the form of a beautiful widget. In addition, you can display various calendars, date and time, weather and much more. All this is available through Conky themes. Next, let's look at the process of installing Conky in Ubuntu.
How to install Conky in Ubuntu

The utility is popular, so you can get it from the official repositories in Ubuntu itself and distributions based on it, for example, in Linux Mint 18. To install, we will do:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install conky-all

Let's launch Conky right now:

$ conky

After executing the command, you will see a simple system monitor in the upper left corner of the screen. In order for it to load automatically in the future, we will add the startup command to the system startup. To do this, open the utility Automatically launched applications from the main menu, and then click the Add button:

Next, in the Command field, you need to register /usr/bin/conky.

How to install Conky Manager

The program is configured via the .conkyrc configuration file, but the process of editing the file manually can be difficult for beginners. To make your work easier, you can use the conky-manager utility.

To install Conky Manager, you need to add a PPA repository:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:linuxmint-tr/araclar
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install conky-manager

After installation, you will find the program in the main menu. Immediately after the first launch, several Conky themes will be available to you. All objects are divided into two types - widgets and themes:

Themes set the desktop image and widgets by default, then you can add additional widgets to them. You can activate them and change the settings for each theme or widget. In the same main window of the program, you can import themes downloaded from the Internet.

What could be the disadvantages of using widgets? For example, one of the most obvious drawbacks is that the program was updated four years ago. Many of the available widgets are simply not compatible with modern work environments, because either it does not start or it starts, but it does not work normally and does not look.

Installing themes manually

To launch the theme, you need to pass the conky utility the path to the main theme configuration file. For example:

$ conky -c ~/.conky/TC-100/tc100

The result is something like this:

The command can be added to the startup as described above.

Please note that since Conky 1.10, the syntax of configuration files has changed, so all the old themes will not work or will work very poorly, which is why Conky Manager practically does not work now. You can try to convert the old theme. To do this, use the convert.lua script:

convert.lua /path/to/old/theme /path/to/new/theme