The tool allows you to easily enable/disable various Conky modules/widgets and it also supports full themes, which is a combination of widgets. You can configure each widget alignment, size, transparency and so on, all from a GUI so if you didn't know how to configure Conky before, give Conky Manager a try.

Conky Manager is a GUI that allows you to easily manage Conky configurations. The latest version - 1.1 -, lets you choose from 7 such configurations / themes.

There are two Conky configurations I've been wanting to write about for a while, but I didn't have the time to do it, until today, so here it is: the first one has been created by Satya, it's called Conky Google Now and is very easy to set up while the second one, created by Pressian, is more advanced and requires some experience with Conky to set it up.

Conky-HTC is a really cool Conky configuration inspired by the HTC weather / clock widget. It displays nice weather icons along with a 7-day weather forecast which can be configured to use either metric or imperial units.

Setting up Conky-HTC is not hard, but it requires quite a few steps and because some of them weren't specified in the Conky-HTC readme, here is everything you need to do to get it working:

Conky Lunatico Rings is a really nice Conky configuration based on Conky Orange which displays rings for the CPU, memory, disk and network usage, in the form of gauges.

(Using the original configuration, it looks like this on my system)

"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.

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:

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:

Conky is simply amazing - with the help of basic scripts you can get it to display any info on your desktop. Here is how to get Conky to display Facebook notifications.

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.

This post explains how to display Google Calendar on your Desktop using Conky and Gcalcli (a tool you can use to manage Google Calendar via the command line).

If you already have a Conky instance running and want to also display Google Calendar on your desktop using Conky, see this how-to on running multiple Conky instances.

A while back we told you about a really easy way to configure Conky using a GUI called ConkyWizard - which is very nice, but it doesn't come with plugins and too many options. Conky Colors on the other hand doesn't come with a GUI but is just as easy to set up (from the command line) and it comes with A LOT of options and scripts (from Gmail to Rhythmbox, weather and more) so you can create an amazing looking Conky in a matter of seconds (don't let our long guide fool you - you just have to install a few packages and run Conky Colors). You can view a list of options supported by Conky Colors, here.

A new Conky Colors version was released today which doesn't brings many new features - but I found this a good opportunity to talk about it since I absolutely love this script.

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.

Conky GUI is a graphic editor that aims to quicken the customization of Conky files.

In case you don't know what Conky is, take a look at the "info panel" in the below image:

You can find a lot more Conky screenshots on Google.

Basically, Conky is a free, light-weight system monitor for X, that displays any information on your desktop.

The problem with Conky (for some) is that you have to manually edit the config file with lots of variables, etc. We've seen other ways of easily creating conkyrc files (the Conky configuration file), such as using Conky Colors, but this only allows you to use pre-build Conky configuration files, so if you want to customize everything yourself, you must manually edit the conkyrc file (~/.conkyrc). Here's where Conky GUI comes in.

Conky is a free, light-weight system monitor for X, that displays any information on your desktop but it's quite difficult especially for beginners to set up.

CONKY-colors Plus is an easier way to configure Conky: it automatically generates a .conkyrc file with different themes, calendar, some useful scripts such as weather, Rhythmbox, it supports multiple languages: English, Spanish, Italian, Polish, German and Portuguese and so on.

1.

sudo apt-get install conky python-statgrab

2. Download and extract the conky-colors.tar.gz, use the terminal to navigate to it's directory and type this in terminal:

make

3. To see the options (the way you want to configure conky):

./conky-colors --help

4. And after you decide on what options to use, type this (replace (options) with the desired options):

./conky-colors (options)
make install

For instance, I choosed these options:

./conky-colors -l en -c proton -cpu 2 --updates --calendar -m --hd --network --ubuntu

Which mean: English language, proton theme, 2 cpu's, show available updates, calendar for which the week starts on Monday, hard disks, network and the ubuntu logo.
Like I said, use the ./conky-colors --help command to see the available options.

5. Now you need to update the font cache:

fc-cache -v -f

6. Attention: In the conky-colors.tar.gz archive there is a hidden .scripts folder where you will find some scripts you can use. For the weather forecast there is a deb file and all you have to do is install it.

To find out how to configure those scripts, see here:

Conky Weather Script: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=869328
Conky SSL Mail Script: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=869771
Conky Rhythmbox Script: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=928168&highlight=conky+rhythmbox
Conky Pidgin Script: httpp://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=969933&highlight=pidgin+conky

If you choose --update apt-get option, open ~/.scripts/updates_monitor and read the instructions (debian/ubuntu users only).

If you choose --todo, create a file called ToDo.txt in your home and open ~/scripts/task file to install this script. It helps you to easy add and remove tasks.

7. To run conky, press Alt + F2 and type:

conky

8. To run conky at startup, you have to do more than just run the conky command, because conky needs to be started after the desktop shows up, so that conky appears on top. So to do that, create an empty file in your home folder, let's call it .conky-startup.sh, make it executable and put this in it:

#!/bin/bash
sleep 30 && conky ;

Save the file and go to System > Preferences > Startup Applications, click "Add" and add the path to the .conky-startup.sh file, for instance /home/.conky-startup.sh

You may also want to read about a great Conky alternative with HTML support.