Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...
A system monitor is a hardware- or software- based system used to monitor resources and performance in a computer system.Software monitors occur more commonly, sometimes as a part of a widget engine. These monitoring systems are often used to keep track of system resources, such as CPU usage and...
The X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
FreeBSD is a free Unix-like operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via BSD UNIX. Although for legal reasons FreeBSD cannot be called “UNIX”, as the direct descendant of BSD UNIX , FreeBSD’s internals and system APIs are UNIX-compliant...
OpenBSD is a Unix-like computer operating system descended from Berkeley Software Distribution , a Unix derivative developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It was forked from NetBSD by project leader Theo de Raadt in late 1995...
. Conky is highly configurable and is able to monitor many system variables including the status of the CPU
Central processing unit
The central processing unit is the portion of a computer system that carries out the instructions of a computer program, to perform the basic arithmetical, logical, and input/output operations of the system. The CPU plays a role somewhat analogous to the brain in the computer. The term has been in...
Disk storage or disc storage is a general category of storage mechanisms, in which data are digitally recorded by various electronic, magnetic, optical, or mechanical methods on a surface layer deposited of one or more planar, round and rotating disks...
top is a program found in many Unix-like operating systems. It produces an ordered list of running processes selected by user-specified criteria, and updates it periodically. Default ordering by CPU usage, and only the top CPU consumers shown top shows how much processing power and memory are...
Network interface may refer to:* Network interface controller, the device a computer uses to connect to a computer network* Network interface device, a demarcation point for a telephone network...
s, battery power, system messages, e-mail inboxes, Arch Linux
Arch Linux
Arch Linux is an independently developed, Linux-based operating system for i686 and x86-64 computers. It is composed predominantly of free and open source software, and supports community involvement....
Music Player Daemon is a music player server.- Design :MPD simply runs in the background playing music from its playlist. Client programs communicate with MPD to manipulate playback, the playlist, and the database...
Audacious is a free software audio player with a focus on low resource usage, high audio quality, and support for a wide range of audio formats. It is designed primarily for use on POSIX-compatible systems such as Linux, with limited support for Microsoft Windows...
), and much more. Unlike system monitors that use high-level widget toolkit
Widget toolkit
In computing, a widget toolkit, widget library, or GUI toolkit is a set of widgets for use in designing applications with graphical user interfaces...
s to render their information, Conky is drawn directly in an X window. This allows it to consume relatively fewer system resources when configured similarly.
Conky has gained a strong following among many Linux and BSD enthusiasts, and was hailed as "one of the best maintained, and definitely one of the most useful, programs in the world of open source" according to Jan Rähm in a March 2009 article in Linux Magazine.
History
Conky is a fork of torsmo, a system monitor that is no longer maintained. Torsmo, however, continues to be used in systems where applications that use minimal resources are preferred. Damn Small Linux
Damn Small Linux
Damn Small Linux or DSL is a computer operating system for the x86 family of personal computers. It is free and open source software under the terms of GNU GPL and other free and open source licenses. It was designed to run graphical applications on older PC hardware—for example, machines with...
, for example, runs torsmo in its desktop root window on the default installation of its Live CD. Conky derives its name from a character in the Canadian television programme Trailer Park Boys
Trailer Park Boys
Trailer Park Boys is a Canadian comedy mockumentary television series created and directed by Mike Clattenburg that focuses on the misadventures of a group of trailer park residents, some of whom are ex-convicts, living in the fictional Sunnyvale Trailer Park in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. The...
.
Common uses
While Conky is ideally suited for use as a system monitor, it can also be used to gather and display almost any type of information on the user's desktop (as well as in the command line, if one chooses). Conky can be extended with the Lua programming language, and uses its own functional
Functional programming
In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids state and mutable data. It emphasizes the application of functions, in contrast to the imperative programming style, which emphasizes changes in state...
-ish configuration file syntax. Conky features built-in support for several unrelated sources of information, but its biggest strength lies in its ability to be extended through scripting.
Conky has also been ported to devices such as the Nokia N900
Nokia N900
The Nokia N900 is a smartphone made by Nokia. It supersedes the Nokia N810. Its default operating system, Maemo 5, is a Linux-based OS originally developed for the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. It is the first Nokia device based upon the Texas Instruments OMAP3 microprocessor with the ARM Cortex-A8...
, and can be ported to practically any system with GCC
GNU Compiler Collection
The GNU Compiler Collection is a compiler system produced by the GNU Project supporting various programming languages. GCC is a key component of the GNU toolchain...
The X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...
implementation.
Users have created and distributed many customized scripts, demonstrating Conky's modularity and versatility in function and appearance. A thread on the Ubuntu
Ubuntu (operating system)
Ubuntu is a computer operating system based on the Debian Linux distribution and distributed as free and open source software. It is named after the Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu...
forums has grown to over 1300 pages of users sharing their configurations.
Usage example
A simple configuration for Conky which displays the time on a user's desktop is as follows:
update_interval 30
own_window yes
own_window_type desktop
use_xft yes
xftfont DejaVu Sans:size=14
alignment bottom_right
TEXT
${time %H:%M}
Default configuration file location is $HOME/.conkyrc or ${sysconfdir}/conky/conky.conf. On most systems, sysconfdir is /etc, and you can find the sample config file there (/etc/conky/conky.conf).
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