Having seen many a flash desktop with system info, I decided to give Conky a go. Going in to the package manager and installing ‘conky’ was easy enough! With no menu entry I did the old Alt+F2 trick and just entered ‘conky’ to see if anything would happen.

Life!

A small window popped up at the bottom left of the screen with some basic info, but it wasn’t embedded into my desktop, nor was it pretty. Back to the drawing board.

After a quick search at Ubuntu Forums, it seems you need to create a .conkyrc file in the home directory and configure it through that text file.I found a basic conky configuration and pasted it in to my .conkyrc file and gave it a whirl. Progress! Conky was now embedded in the desktop but it was flickering like mad. The almighty Ubuntu Forums then tells me that you need to enable double buffering in the conky config file. Ok, done that. Try again.

What the…

Now my desktop icons are missing! What gives?! But wait, moving my pointer over where the icons were, brings them back. For a flash. Then conky wipes them out again!

Grrr!

Eventually, after many a search, I came across a small piece of code which said:

own_window yes
own_window_type override
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager

… and that was it!

My Ubuntu desktop with Conky in the top right corner

Conky seems to work better when it is in a window which is transparent, has no decorations, and is stuck to the desktop.

Once I had conky working I found a more elaborate config file and chopped out some unnecessary bits to give me:

My current conky setup

As conky configs go, mine is pretty standard, you can get really creative and have Gmail alerts, weather reports (my next project) and all sorts in there!

Long live conky!

I’ll post my conky config in the comments below…