HOW TO: A Beginners Guide to Setting up Conky

[Ng Oon-Ee]

You're welcome . Thanks for the great guide, its been helpful.

[nyarnon]

Finaly solution, using the dbus plugin in compiz, which returns an error if compiz is not fully functional yet (initial help came from the compiz forums).

Thanks that found it's way into my ~/bin very usefull indeed.

[Ng Oon-Ee]

Thanks that found it's way into my ~/bin very usefull indeed.

You're welcome. Dbus is such an amazing tool.

[FerociousTwig]

So I'm having trouble with this... whenever I restart conky I do the following.

sudo killall conky
sudo conky

Then I get about 50 error messages every 1/2 second or so that read:

Conky: MPD error: problems getting a response from "localhost" on port 6600 : Connection refused

Then sometimes it will eventually work. Othertimes I get too frustrated and just give up. Any ideas?

(complete noob, sorry)

[Bruce M.]

So I'm having trouble with this... whenever I restart conky I do the following.

sudo killall conky
sudo conky

Then I get about 50 error messages every 1/2 second or so that read:

Conky: MPD error: problems getting a response from "localhost" on port 6600 : Connection refused

Then sometimes it will eventually work. Othertimes I get too frustrated and just give up. Any ideas?

(complete noob, sorry)

Hi FerociousTwig,

Welcome to conky, soon you will be addicted like most of us.

Well, we were all new to conky at one time. Don't apologize for it. I doubt very much you are a noob either, due to the fact you are trying and asking for help. I really do dislike that term.

It sounds like you copied a conky from someone else and you have calls that you don't need with you system.

Anyway since the guide come with no real conky setup, it's difficult to answer your questions here. So before you get to frustrated there are a lot of recourses available to you, two of which are:

Conky Hardcore! - a conky reference site with some setups although more complicated. There is a simple conky there to get you started, and

The mega thread here: Post your .conkyrc files w/ screenshots where you can post the conky you have and ask your questions. If I don't answer you there, it will be because someone beat me to it. There is a lot of people in that thread helping others from the very simple "I'm new to this" questions to the more complex ones.

Just don't give up, and you'll surprise yourself how easy it is when you have the answers. Like I tell people, "If I can do it, anyone can."

Have a nice day.
Bruce

[neo.patrix]

I found Conky when searching for some cool desktop stuff. I have started with Conky-Colors. It is very addictive as fore warned. I spent nearlly three hours with colors & some icon customization, most of trying to decipher commands in ".conkyrc" how & where to make changes. Next I am going to modify ".conkyrc" to get system-logs.

Here my desktop with customized theme for ConkyColors



".conkyrc" was generated with command

./conky-colors --theme=human --unit=C --cpu=2 --powerb --updates=apt-get --proc=3 --calendar --banshee --network --wlan=0

[coffee-n-cream]

hey guys great writeup.I manage to get conky working but the displayed time does not update itself.how do i fix this? thx

[Bruce M.]

hey guys great writeup.I manage to get conky working but the displayed time does not update itself.how do i fix this? thx

Hi coffee-n-cream

The mega thread here: Post your .conkyrc files w/ screenshots is where you can post the conky you have and ask your questions. If I don't answer you there, it will be because someone beat me to it. There is a lot of people in that thread helping others from the very simple "I'm new to this" questions to the more complex ones.

This is a HowTo and I'd rather not duplicate the above thread. It is so helpful that people using other dustro's come here to ask conky questions.

Have a nice day.
Bruce

[theGlitch]

very helpful how-to! thanks!

Is there anyway to edit the width of the Conky window?

[Cardale]

Great! this helped a lot.