How to install and configure Conky in Ubuntu

Conky is a free system monitor tool for Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. It includes options to monitor system variables like CPU and RAM usage, swap space, processes, CPU temperatures, battery status and much more. 

Conky also gives a cool look to your desktop by displaying all these system variables in run time updates. In this article, we will see how to install and configure Conky.

Installing Conky

Open Terminal and use below commands to install Conky.

sudo apt-get install conky-all

Once installed, you can run it from the command line:

conky

This will show the default Conky display. In the below screenshot, you can see Conky displaying System Up time, Frequency, RAM usage, SWAP usage, CPU usage, Storage information and the processes in order of their CPU usage. To exit, you can just press Ctrl + C in terminal. 

Configuring Conky manually

Conky usage ~/.conkyrc file for the configuration inputs. However, by default this file is not present and it usage the default configuration from /etc/conky/conky.config file. 

Lets just try to configure and use this qlocktwo for Conky. 

Download the file and extract it anywhere. 

Rename the file to .conkyrc and move it to home folder. 

mv .conkyrc_clock ~/

mv .conkyrc_clock .conkyrc

Once done, run conky from the command line

conky

It shows the time on your desktop!

Manual configuration is a pain for installing and configuring Conky themes specially when there are multiple configuration files and missing one thing means something will be wrong. 

There is a GUI application called Conky Manager that handles all these tasks for you. All you have to do is download the theme and put it in a folder. You don't need terminal to run it each time and you can easily configure the different properties like size, width etc from the application itself.

To install Conky Manager, type in the below command in Terminal:

sudo apt-add-repository -y ppa:teejee2008/ppa

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install conky-manager 

Once done, you can use any theme and configure it according to your preference. Move the themes you download to ~/.conky folder and use Conky Manager. 

You can run Conky Manager by searching in Dash or running below command in terminal:

conky-manager

This is how another beautiful Conky theme looks like. 

You can get hundreds of beautiful Conky themes from deviantart.com. There are many contributors who has spend some time to design nice, clean and awesome themes for you. If you are not satisfied, there are more on github which you can find with some Google. 

Do not forget to tell us the best theme you found out and screenshot of your pretty desktop in the comment section. Also, let us know if you face any issues while installing or configuring Conky.