Post your .conkyrc files w/ screenshots

[Habitual]

Reinstall the OS?

a bit excessive for such a small thing, don't you think?

Do you have a root cron set to update the vnstat db periodically, such as:

#vnstat updatedb
*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/vnstat -u >/dev/null 2>&1

?

While I don't have a wlan0 interface, I ran

vnstat -i wlan0+eth0
Error: Unable to read database "/var/lib/vnstat/wlan0".

Do you have an eth0 interface? ifconfig will show them.

[Mk32]

glaze@glaze8CT:~$ ls -l /etc/cron.d/vnstat 
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 308 2014-03-29 15:29 /etc/cron.d/vnstat
glaze@glaze8CT:~$ ifconfig
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
          UP BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)
          Memory:f2600000-f2620000 

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1
          RX packets:12 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:12 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
          RX bytes:720 (720.0 B)  TX bytes:720 (720.0 B)

wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr @@@@@@@@@@@@@@
          inet addr:192.168.32.161  Bcast:192.168.32.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: ********************************/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:54203 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:37447 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:44262857 (44.2 MB)  TX bytes:5371839 (5.3 MB)

glaze@glaze8CT:~$

There's two databases already kept for wlan0 and eth0.

As far as reinstalling the OS, that would be a slight hassle, it'll take about five hours to deal with, but as someone that regularly keeps 2+ OSs on each computer (this one has three, the iMac has three, and the E500 has five) it's not something I balk at much. Windows 7 is *would* be a hassle though. A big one.

[Petro Dawg]

I see you mentioned Linux on a flash drive and this gives me an idea to put Conky on mine too. I have a thumbdrive partitioned with 2GiB FAT32 and ~6GiB of 10.04.4LTS. It makes a fantastic thumbdrive because I can handle the usual file transfers yet still have an emergency OS on hand. Because I meddle with Macs on a regular basis it also has Netatalk 2.1.6, macutils, uudeview and all that.

Ok, you inspired me to try a persistent live install of something a little bigger than Puppy on a USB, I like the utilitarian nature of Puppy for some uses, but got tired of fighting with getting all the little things to work how I wanted. I've always wanted to try Mint but never felt like taking the time to download the 1Gig+ iso image... until now.

Here's my little Conky on my new persistent Mint16 flash drive (using a mint color theme of course)...




I think I may have just become a Mint convert after playing around with the OS for a while. I'm torn; I was one of those who liked Unity even back when everyone else hated it, but I really like Cinnamon now too.

[Mk32]

You know, that's really interesting that you say that, because I have a goal to sometime work out a basic Linux install that has what I need (I don't use much, I could do it all on 8GiB if I wanted to -- as you'll see from this image I don't use much) which runs off a DVD, then dumps the whole thing into RAM and runs entirely in RAM.

I know it's possible, people have done how-tos on it, I should have a basic conky config since as you can tell from that image, the width of the display (1280x800) works out fine since the browser window is simply adjusted to be about the same size as XGA, but I still get to have that conky window right on hand.

I'd like a GNOME2 like interface, too, or something like it. I haven't tried Mint with Cinnamon yet. Because of space concerns I may have to use something like Xfce -- what do you think?

By the way, I was at a local library once. They had just upgraded to some flavor of Linux. As I consider it sport to figure out ways of getting out of kiosk-style applications and show the desktop, I tried to pull up a terminal prompt. Not to do anything malicious, but just to run uname -r so I could figure what kind of Linux it was. There are two things I remembered: 1) it was definitely GNOME 2 interface, and 2) the "Start menu" (it didn't have the top unified menu bar of Debian systems) had four colors just like the Windows 7 style menu, with red, yellow, blue and green. What system would that likely be? (They had just migrated from Windows XP. My local library here still has XP.)

[Petro Dawg]

You know, that's really interesting that you say that, because I have a goal to sometime work out a basic Linux install that has what I need (I don't use much, I could do it all on 8GiB if I wanted to -- as you'll see from this image I don't use much) which runs off a DVD, then dumps the whole thing into RAM and runs entirely in RAM.

I know it's possible, people have done how-tos on it, I should have a basic conky config since as you can tell from that image, the width of the display (1280x800) works out fine since the browser window is simply adjusted to be about the same size as XGA, but I still get to have that conky window right on hand.

I'd like a GNOME2 like interface, too, or something like it. I haven't tried Mint with Cinnamon yet. Because of space concerns I may have to use something like Xfce -- what do you think?

Xfce Mint is still a pretty big install, the download is nearly a GIG in size.

If you primary concern is space, then Puppy is really the only way to go, as it is quite powerful and easy to use for its insanely small size and can be installed on nearly any medium. I've run it smoothly off a compact flash card in an "ancient" Thin Client. It also does a good job of minimizing read/writes to preserve the flash drive. I've tried DamnSmall before as an alternative and I found it to be too minimal to be much useful as a dedicated primary OS, but it does have a "conky like" display on by default (if memory serves).

Some who post regularly on this thread would probably argue that you should look at Arch Linux. I believe it can be fitted with nearly any desktop environment, including Xfce if that's your choice. I'm not sure how easy it is to get it running on a flash drive.

For simplicity's sake I would tend to stick with Lubuntu or Xubuntu as lighter OS choices. There are plenty of programs (like Unetbootin) that make persistent live boots pretty easily with Ubuntu based Distros.

Any decent sized USB drive (4 GIG+) should be able to contain a rather useful full fledged Ubuntu or Mint Distro, depends on what all you like to have installed.

By the way, I was at a local library once. They had just upgraded to some flavor of Linux. As I consider it sport to figure out ways of getting out of kiosk-style applications and show the desktop, I tried to pull up a terminal prompt. Not to do anything malicious, but just to run uname -r so I could figure what kind of Linux it was. There are two things I remembered: 1) it was definitely GNOME 2 interface, and 2) the "Start menu" (it didn't have the top unified menu bar of Debian systems) had four colors just like the Windows 7 style menu, with red, yellow, blue and green. What system would that likely be? (They had just migrated from Windows XP. My local library here still has XP.)

Hard to tell, it could be nearly anything as most distros can be modified to look like any other and installed with nearly any desktop environment.

[Mk32]

Yeah, I was poking around small distros last year and came across two likely candidates: PuppyLinux and DSL.

I think you are right from memory that DSL does have a conky script by default.

I will have to investigate PL a bit more. Have you played with any other micro Linux distros, like the ones listed here by any chance? I could definitely get some 1.44MB floppys and fiddle with some of them on the E500 because it has a built in floppy. I'm allergic to CLI only OSes, however I do know of some kind of X11 interface that could be worked out with muLinux but you need extra floppies. I don't know if any of the others will have a GUI of any sort, mainly because a GUI is really difficult to fit on a floppy*.

I should see if I can get Netatalk 2.1.6 going on puppylinux. There are a healthy number of dependencies though, and I'm not a command-line expert either. Building a bunch of stuff from source really bores me. (I was told on Debian IRC once that most *NIX experts would rather die than have to bring some old distro with no repository support up to date with modern stuff. I believe it.)

I should get back to Conky. Seems my symptoms of Conkyitis have disappeared. :/ I'll have to reinvestigate the vnstat hiccup.

*: Macintosh System 6 and earlier can work quite well off one floppy disk. I can get System 6.0.8 networked and on to a remote FTP server off just one floppy disk -- and still have a full-on GUI. (Can do it with two 800Ks, if it doesn't have a 1.44MB drive.) System 6 and earlier can also hot-swap boot volumes without restarting (such as starting up from a floppy, format the HDD, copy over the System Folder from the floppy to the hard disk, then hot-swap so the HDD is now the active volume, then eject the floppy.) and work with RAM disks (such as running the entire OS and a program or two in RAM) which are foreign concepts these days, or even neigh on impossible.

EDIT: Okay back to work: I removed and purged all the vnstat databases. Still gives me the segementation fault. So I ran apt-cache depends vnstat and it reports libc6 as a dependency. Soooo because I'm new to this game I tried sudo apt-get autoremove libc6 so I could find out how much damage it would cause trying to uninstall it and reinstall it. Ummmm Noooo....

0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1431 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
After this operation, 3,162MB disk space will be freed.
You are about to do something potentially harmful.
To continue type in the phrase 'Yes, do as I say!'
 ?] no
Abort.
glaze@glaze8CT:

I may have to reinstall the OS. I'm thinking an update of libc6 through the Update Manager may have broken vnstat for some reason. How, without taking down the rest of the OS? I don't know. I could try conky again on the thumbdrive, that's still on kernel 2.6.32.51 if I recall correctly, I'm on 2.6.32.57 right now. I haven't been using Linux lately because I've been spending time inside Windows 7. (Between the two, they hassle me about the same, but I like GNOME 2 more than Aero.) So I may have not noticed vnstat failing to work when I updated the system. I'll have to get some more advice.

[giel2]

I used Spano's: looks great! Thanks!

[Petro Dawg]

I will have to investigate PL a bit more. Have you played with any other micro Linux distros, like the ones listed here by any chance?

If its below #25 on the DistroWatch top 100 hit rankings, I've probably not used it enough to give an opinion. (Except DSL, which I used for ~2 minutes before deleting).

I could definitely get some 1.44MB floppys and fiddle with some of them on the E500 because it has a built in floppy. I'm allergic to CLI only OSes, however I do know of some kind of X11 interface that could be worked out with muLinux but you need extra floppies. I don't know if any of the others will have a GUI of any sort, mainly because a GUI is really difficult to fit on a floppy*.

Floppies? What, did you run out of punch cards???
2398292022_d3e8a53bf3_o.jpg

I should see if I can get Netatalk 2.1.6 going on puppylinux. There are a healthy number of dependencies though, and I'm not a command-line expert either. Building a bunch of stuff from source really bores me. (I was told on Debian IRC once that most *NIX experts would rather die than have to bring some old distro with no repository support up to date with modern stuff. I believe it.)

If it runs on Ubuntu or Slackware there is a good chance you will be able to get it to run on either Lucid or Slacko Puppy, but it might take a little work.


Also...
I typically find it easier and usually faster to just back up anything important and reinstall the OS than trying to fix major (or sometimes minor) system issues. I'm sure I've compiled and/or installed conky and re-written the .conkyrc from "scratch" at least 20 times by now on my many many OS re-installs. After the first few times it goes rather quickly.

[Mk32]

Your attachment isn't working, but seeing that you mentioned punch cards, I once saw some kind of book thingaling for coding a IBM System/360 in assembly or machine code. (I think it was the Coding Form. Looked kind of like it.) Had like 100+ pages of just raw sheets for hand-writing your own program. Hope you know assembly!

Netatalk does run on Debian systems, along with Fedora, Gentoo, openSUSE, Solaris, *BSD, and probably one more. Let me post this and check back with the ./configure --help string...

EDIT: Ahh yes here we are:

  --enable-redhat         use redhat-style sysv configuration
  --enable-suse           use suse-style sysv configuration
  --enable-gentoo         use gentoo-style sysv configuration
  --enable-cobalt         use cobalt-style sysv configuration
  --enable-netbsd         use NetBSD-style rc.d configuration
  --enable-debian         use debian-style sysv configuration

I also mirror your comments about just backing up and redoing it. There's a reason I have manual backups -- because I guess I have a certain way about things, and can't be bothered to learn some auto-backup app (which if it fails, wouldn't be something I'd appreciate, plus I need multi-platform access) and I have less than 120GiB of backups (all put together).

EDIT 2: Found netatalk in the slackware source repository. Basically stuck with either 2.0.4 or 2.2.3: 2.0.4 is a bit old and 2.2.x in my experience did not work with AFP over AppleTalk. Which reminds me that yesterday I reckoned that PL won't have AppleTalk and DDP support in the kernel. That brings up the question of how to add it into it. Maybe...?

I should find some time to fiddle with that setup and I'll probably need some help from some command-line pros & kernel kings.

[Petro Dawg]

Sorry about the faulty punch card image, it should be fixed now; that's what I get for trying to post during my lunch break on my locked down Internet access at work.

I re-made my USB persistent install by creating two FAT32 8G partitions on a 16G USB and then using Unetbootin to make a persistent installation on one of the partitions. That way I can still have access to portable storage while running the live session. It makes life a bit easier.

It took about an hour to backup, reformat, and reinstall Conky, emulators, and games.

I had to re-tool my Conky a bit to reflect the new storage space, so here's my latest...



.conkyrc

#conky performance settings
  update_interval 1
  total_run_times 0
  cpu_avg_samples 4
  no_buffers yes 
  double_buffer yes
  override_utf8_locale yes
  text_buffer_size 4352

#overall position of conky window
  alignment mr
  gap_x 25
  gap_y 0
  minimum_size 185 200
  maximum_width 185


#overall appearance of conky window
  own_window yes
  own_window_type desktop
  own_window_transparent yes
  own_window_hints undecorated,above,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager
  draw_borders no
  own_window_argb_visual yes
  own_window_argb_value 255
  stippled_borders 0

#default text apperance
  use_xft yes
  xftalpha 1
  xftfont Alfios:size=12
  default_color E5E5E5 #E2D6C8 #FFFFFF 
  draw_shades 1
  draw_outline no
  default_shade_color black
  default_outline_color black 
  uppercase no


#border around graphs
  draw_graph_borders no


#colors 
  color1 D9B591 #main headings
  color5 A6DE83 #subheadings
  color9 DEB49B #dot
  color0 6FC73C #bars

TEXT
${color1}${font Alfios:size=12:bold}BATTERY${font}${color}\
${alignr}${if_match ${battery_percent} == 100}Fully Charged${else}${battery_time}${endif}
${color0}${battery_bar BAT0}


${color1}${font Alfios:size=12:bold}CPU${font}${alignr}${color}${freq_g}GHz
${color0}${cpubar cpu0}${color}
${color5}Temps${color}${alignr}${execp sensors nouveau-pci-0100 | awk '/temp1/ {gsub("+",""); print $2}'}\
${color9}  &  ${color}\
${execp sensors coretemp-isa-0000 | awk '/Physical/ {gsub("+",""); print $4}'} ${font}${voffset 2}


${color1}${font Alfios:size=12:bold}RAM${font}${color}${alignr}${memmax} Max
${color0}${membar}


${color1}${font Alfios:size=12:bold}STORAGE${font}
${color5}Persistence${color}${alignr}${fs_free /} Free
${color0}${fs_bar /}
${color5}Shared USB${color}${alignr}${fs_free /media/mint/USB_STORAGE} Free
${color0}${fs_bar /media/mint/USB_STORAGE}


${color1}${font Alfios:size=12:bold}NETWORK${font}${color}${alignr}${wireless_essid wlan0}
${color0}${wireless_link_bar wlan0}
${color5}DLS${color}  ${downspeed wlan0}${alignr}${totaldown wlan0}
${color5}ULS${color}  ${upspeed wlan0}${alignr}${totalup wlan0}${font}


${color1}${font Alfios:size=12:bold}${time %^B %Y}${color}${alignr}${font}${time %l:%M %p}
${font DroidSansMono:size=11}${color5}${execpi 60 VinDSL_Cal_9=`date +%-d`; cal -h | sed -e 's/\r//g' -e 's/^/ /g' -e '1d' -e s/^/"\$\{offset -10"\}/ -e 's/\<'"$VinDSL_Cal_9"'\>/${font DroidSansMono:size=11:bold}${color}&${font DroidSansMono:size=11}${color5}/'}${font}