Try A Beautiful, NotifyOSD-Like Conky Setup

"notifyOSD Conky" is a simple Conky setup created by BigRZA that displays the CPU usage / temperature, RAM and HDD usage as well as the network traffic.

To use it, download the configuration from DeviantArt, extract the downloaded archive and place the configuration files in your home folder (the archive contains hidden files so press CTRL + H to see them).

Of course, you'll also need Conky so install it if you didn't already:

sudo apt-get install conky

For getting the temperature to work, see step 2 in this post.

The original notifyOSD Conky configuration is partially in German and needs a few other tweaks (there are a few errors) to work properly (at least that was the case on my system). Here's how it looks on my system:

I've translated it to English and removed a few bits including the temperature part and replaced it with 2 more CPU cores (I have 4). If you want my modifications to notifyOSD Conky, get it from here - all credits for this: BigRZA (remember, the files in the archive are hidden so press CTRL + H to see them).

For more Conky configurations, check out our Conky tag.

[via ubuntu.onego.ru; first screenshot in the post thanks to BigRZA]

System Monitor Indicator Puts The CPU And Memory Usage On Your Panel

System Monitor Indicator is a new appindicator that displays your system CPU and memory usage on the panel - be it the regular Gnome panel or the new Unity top bar.

The info is displayed directly on the panel, without having to click anything. This may not sound like a good idea if you use a netbook, but if you have a 20'' or larger monitor, you probably have plenty of space on your top panel.

Maybe some option to display the info in a drop-down or chose what info is displayed (with the other being displayed upon clicking the appindicator) would be nice though. But this is the first System Monitor Indicator release so it has plenty of time to improve.

The System Monitor Indicator developer welcomes all ideas / suggestions so if you have an idea for a cool feature, leave a comment! Or submit a bug.

Download

System Monitor Indicator is available in a PPA but for Ubuntu 11.04 only so if you use Natty already, simply add the PPA and install "indicator-sysmonitor".

For Ubuntu 10.10 (I've actually only tested it in Maverick), simply download and install THIS deb file (for both 32bit and 64bit).


Want more AppIndicators? See here.

2 More Beautiful, Easy To Set Up Conky LUA Configurations

Here are two more great and easy to set up Conky LUA configurations: Conky HUD and Conky Grey:


Conky HUD - DOWNLOAD:

Conky Grey - DOWNLOAD:

Both Conky Grey (and the other color variations) and Conky HUD can be installed by creating a folder called ".conky" in your home directory and placing both files extracted from the downloaded archive (either Conky HUD or Conky Gray - or both) into this folder.

Then start Conky HUD using the following command:

conky -c ~/.conky/conkyrc_HUD

Start Conky Grey using the following command:

conky -c ~/.conky/conkyrc_grey

To customize Conky HUD / Conky Gray, open the "conkyrc_HUD" or the "conkyrc_grey" file and:

• to modify the text color change the "color" value (for all the "color" parameters like "color1", "color2" and so on.
• to change the position on the desktop, modify the "gap_x" and "gap_y" values.

For Conky HUD: to modify the ring colors, open "conky_HUD.lua" and replace the "00FFBB" value (do a "search and replace all) with the color you want.

For Conky Gray: to modify the ring colors do the same as above, but replace "ffffff" with the color you want for the rings.

Also see: Try This Great Looking Conky Lua Configuration For Ubuntu, Fedora Or Linux Mint

Try This Great Looking Conky Lua Configuration For Ubuntu, Fedora Or Linux Mint

Despot77 posted a great looking Conky Lua configuration at Gnome-Look that displays some beautiful rings for the cpu, clock, ram, swap, disk, net and also comes with an easy way to display the weather that doesn't involve you register to any website, work with API keys and so on. Another thing I like about this configuration is that it comes with various color themes and distribution logos: Fedora, Linux Mint and Ubuntu (update: the package also provides Debian and openSUSE configurations).

Here is a screenshot of my desktop - setting it up took under one minute so don't get scared about the instructions below, it's actually quite easy:

To set it up (obviously, you must install conky first), download the archive from Gnome Look, extract it and:

1. Create a folder called ".conky" in your home directory and copy the Linux Mint / Ubuntu / Fedora image to this folder.

2. In your home directory create a folder called ".lua" and inside this folder, create a new folder called "scripts". Here, copy the "clock_rings.lua" file.

3. Copy the "conkyrc" file in your home directory and rename it to ".conkyrc" (just add a dot in front of the filename).

4. To set the weather for your city, go to http://weather.noaa.gov and search for your city. The URL will then look like this (this is for my country / city): http://weather.noaa.gov/weather/current/LRBS.html - copy the code at the end (LRBS in my case) and in the ~/.conkyrc file, replace "LQBK" with your code.

Want more Conky configurations? Browse our Conky tag.

Conky Colors Gets A New "Board Mode"

Conky is a light-weight system monitor that displays the info on your desktop - you've seen it in many screenshots so I'm sure most of you already know what Conky is. Conky Colors is a tool that make is very easy to set up and configure Conky.

A new Conky Colors version has been released (5.0 beta 1) today which adds a beautiful new "board mode" which you can see in the screenshot in the beginning of the post. Here's another screenshot using a light (Radiance) Conky Colors theme:

How to use Conky Colors Board Mode

To use the new Conky Colors board mode, firstly you'll have to set up Conky and Conky Colors as explained in THIS post.

To set up the "board" mode, use "--board" when configuring Conky Colors. Here are all the options available for the board mode:

--w= - Set your screen width
--h= - Set your screen height
--theme=<theme> - Set default theme color (Doesn't work with skiki-colors/shikidust/dust themes)
--dark - Set Dark Brightness (Doesn't work with ambiance/radiance/elementary themes)
--alldark - Set Dark Brightness for all (Doesn't work with any theme)
--alllight - Set light Brightness for all (Doesn't work with any theme)
--cpu=<number> - Set number of cpu cores [max=2]
--unit=<C|F> - Force output temperature either in Celius or Fahrenheit

Here is the exact command that I've used to create the Conky Colors configuration that you can see in the first screenshot in this post:

./conky-colors --board --w=1920 --h=1080 --cpu=2 --dark

Unfortunately there are two drawbacks to this new board mode: it supports a maximum of 2 CPUs - hopefully it will get support for more CPUs in the future (as this is still in beta); there's not much you can customize about it, unlike the default Conky Colors mode which has a huge list of options so if you want more info on your desktop, use that instead.

Download Conky Colors

3 Beautiful Conky Configurations

1. Conky Meet Faenza

2. Conky Launchpad

3. Conky Ken

The first 2 Conky setups above are very easy to configure - just install conky, then copy the extracted files (look for hidden files and folders too) into your folder and that's it. Conky Ken takes a bit longer to set up but it's not all that difficult, however I couldn't get the weather to work (it might have something to do with might location though). For each of the 3 Conky setups above, download the archive and see the README for exact installation instructions.

And speaking of Conky - Conky Colors, an utility to easily set up amazing custom Conky configuration has just been updated (by the way, I was using Conky Colors in the Compiz 0.9.2 screenshot). Download the latest Conky Colors | How to set up Conky Colors Cairo mode (rings).

Conky Colors Gets A Beautiful New Cairo Mode, Elementary Theme

Conky Colors - a script to easily configure Conky with lots of built-in options -, added some cool new features recently: cairo mode (--cairo) and a new theme: Elementary.

You can see the Cairo mode in action in the screenshot we posted above. To get Conky to look like in this post, the following command was used:

./conky-colors --cairo --theme=elementary --cpu=2 --swap --clock=cairo --rhythmbox=cairo --network --unit=C

The above command will use the Elementary Conky Colors theme and will display the CPU usage (for 2 CPUs), SWAP, a clock, your currently playing track in Rhythmbox and network information with the temperature using Celsius - all using the new Cairo mode. You can of course tweak it to suit your taste. To see all the available options, use:

./conky-colors --help

We already posted how to install and use Conky Colors, so see our initial post for instructions: Conky Colors Makes Your Conky Beautiful In Seconds (don't be scared by the lengthy post, there are just a few copy/paste commands).

Download Conky Colors 4.0

ConkyWizard: GUI To Set Up Conky Automatically

Conky is a free, light-weight system monitor for X, that displays any information on your desktop. You've seen it in many screenshots under various forms; take a look at these screenshots if you don't know what Conky is.

To use Conky, you must manually set it up - and that's not easy as you must manually create the configuration file and customize it yourself. But now you can do this a lot easier using ConkyWizard, a GUI written in Qt and C++ to set up Conky and customize everything visually.

ConkyWizard comes precompiled for now (you need Qt to run it), but a PPA will be available soon. Before using ConkyWizard, you'll of course need to install Conky:

sudo apt-get install conky

To use ConkyWizard, simply DOWNLOAD it, extract the archive and double click the extracted file. A note from our readers: it seems the 64-bit binaries do not work, but the 32-bit version works in Ubuntu 64bit.

ConkyWizard default theme is based on the Ubuntu Lucid Conky theme which was available @ Gnome-Look but it allows you to customize every detail as well as automatically run it on startup and so on. It even sets up the delay required for Conky to be displayed correctly after the computer starts up. Please note that it has only been tested with Ubuntu Lucid so it may not work with other Ubuntu versions.

To get the sensors to work, you'll need lm-sensors which you can install using the following command:

sudo apt-get install lm-sensors

And then to set up the sensors, run this:

sudo sensors-detect

and answer "y" (yes) to everything.

Finally, run the following command to get the sensors to start:

sudo /etc/init.d/module-init-tools start

If you still don't see any temperatures in Conky, restart your computer.

Change Ctrl + Alt + Delete Behavior To Open System Monitor, in Gnome [ Linux ]

Actually, I've written this post before (quite a few months ago) but then deleted it because it didn't work. In the mean time, I found out why, so I decided to post it again. I find pressing Control + Alt + Delete to open up System Monitor to be very useful, especially for Windows users who are used to it and may actually press this quite a few times before realizing it doesn't do anything or what it does in Windows. Using System Monitor, you can preview all running processes, end or kill them, see how much CPU a process is using, CPU + memory + network history, available disk space and even change how much CPU a process should use.

There are 2 ways of changing Ctrl + Alt + Delete behavior to open System Monitor: one if you are running Compiz, and one for Metacity, only to use if you are not running Compiz.

Step 1: This is actually very important: go to System > Preferences > Keyboard shortcurs and search for any command which already has Ctrl + Alt + Delete set as a shortcut and change it's shortcut. If you don't change this, it will not work! If you want to use the "Del" ("keypad .") button instead of "Delete", search for that and also make sure there's no shorcut set for it.

Once you complete step 1, we can proceed.

Method 1: Using Compiz

1.1. Make sure you have CCSM (CompizConfig Settings Manager) installed, and go to System > Preferences > ompizConfig Settings Manager.


1.2. Under "General", notice the "Commands" option. Enable the check box next to it, and then click it.

1.3. On the Commands tab, choose an empty line and paste this:

gnome-system-monitor

Important: remember which line it was. For instance, I have chosen line 1.

1.4. On the Key Bindings Tab, for the same line you entered the command at step 1.3. (for which I choose line 1), there is now something called "Run command X" which is the key combination to be pressed to launch the command you entered under the "Commands" tab. OK, so next to this "Run Command 1" (in my case) line, press on the "disabled" button. A new window pops-up: check the "enable" box. Then, you are asked to select the key combination. You can simply press the "Grab key combination" button, and then press Ctrl + Alt + Delete (Or Ctrl + Alt + KP_decimal which is "Del" -> the button on the bottom right corner on your keyboard).

That's it, you can now test your new Ctrl + Alt + Delete

Method 2: Using Metacity

If you use Compiz and followed the steps above, than all this is already set for you so there is no need to read on :). If you don't use Compiz:

2.1. Press Alt + F2 on your keboard and type:

gconf-editor

2.2. Then navigate to: apps > metacity > keybinding_commands and choose a "command_x" parameter which is empty. I choose "command_2". Right click it, select "Edit" and enter:

gnome-system-monitor

2.3. Now go to apps > metacity > global_keybindings and if you choose "command_2", then right click "run_command_2" and select "Edit", then enter:

<Control><Alt>Delete

for Ctrl + Alt + Delete, or:

<Control><Alt>KP_Decimal

(for Ctrl + Alt + Del - just "Del", not "Delete")

And you are done!