by schischa

First a short description to those not knowing conky: conky is a highly configurable and tiny system monitor (imho the best for X as I don’t like GKrllM). It can do a lot, you just need to know how to do it…

### Intro

After switching from a 14″ widescreen Laptop to a 12″ IBM Thinkpad X31 I didn’t see my conky as often as I would have liked to see it (hey, what sense would a system monitor make, if you didn’t see it…)
The best solution I figured out was having a horizontal conky which would be placed at the bottom of the desktop and as tiny as possible so I would be able to run most apps in nearly fullscreen mode but still having in sight the most important things. Looking at the screenshot section I found a quite nice horizontal conky but it was achieved by running conky 3 times with 3 different conkyrc. This consumed up to 5% CPU power which was far too much imho so i started thinking about creating my own one which will be better then the rest… hopefully

### Getting started

Probably the most annoying thing was the changing width of some lines caused by increased cpu load for example but thanks to drphibes in #conky on freenode I was able to eliminate that problem with the use_spacer yes option. After that it was straight forward and the only problem i had was how to position the different items and chosing which I needed wanted ;)
First part are some small bars for things like CPU and the mounted partitions, followed by percentage aso. Second part is netstats like wlan strength and up/down speeds. After that the system monitor with the 3 top processes and some infos. To move the different items in their horizontal position you can use either simple spaces or the offset variable. I mostly used offset because it’s more comfortable imho but do as you please.
Last thing are portage infos which I implemented with Hellf[i]re’s scripts (found them on the conky page, big thx). They are gentoo specific as portage is gentoo’s package manager, so if you want to use my conkyrc on another distro just remove the parts in the conkyrc. If gentoo is the operating system conky will run on you’ll need to do 2 things:
first: the portage scripts need to be executable as conky executes them with the different exec variables so just execute the following:

# chmod +x /home/$user/.conky/emerge*

second: the user who is running conky needs to have read access to /var/log/emerge.log which leads to a problem: every time you start emerging something, gentoo will reestablish the root-only read access to the file so (as root)

# chmod o+r emerge.log

won’t work but until you start emerging something. Easiest solution is to add your user to the portage group with (as root)

# gpasswd -a $user portage

You _won’t_ be able to (un-)install programms but will be able to read the emerge.log. I will watch out for a more restrictive solution but till then this should work fine ;)

### Finishing off

This is just a first snapshot of my conkyrc (call it release if you want). I plan to implement (much )better colors and 2 different rcs for dark and bright backgrounds so everybody should be happy. The layout is quite final although some items possibly will get some little improvements. Perhaps i will also implement jesse’s timeleft script for portage which is based on genlop but this has quite a low priority atm.
At the moment there are still some small problems so I will tell you how to avoid them: the first line of the conkyrc with infos about hostname and used kernel will differ from mine so you will also have to change the first offset variable to a value that works for you.

### Info to the files
I created a hidden directory to put all the scripts in called .conky under /home/$user/ . If you like something else you will need to change the conkyrc so it works for you. You will definitely need to change the username except you are called schischa too :P
Please comment and rate so I know what to think of next!

Here are the files: conkyrc and scripts