Conky System Monitor on My Desktop. How to Install and Configure It on Linux

In this video I show how to set up Conky - the best system monitor widget for your desktop. It can display cpu load, network traffic, time, memory usage, temperatures, list processes and much more!

You can support my work here:

The commands used in this tutorial, Conky config file and the walpaper you can find here:

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The animation Grease Pencil and Bones, used in this video, is licensed under
the Creative Commons Attribution license:
(CC) Daniel M. Lara (Pepeland)

[heikokraemer]

Man, I've spent the whole Saturday styling that thing and transforming it into a 4-column horizontal layout. Was more complicated as I thought. You've to build the screen left to right, line by line … wasn't used to think that way, but found a good method in the end to process that sorting task with Vim. I'm quite happy with the outcome, will tweak it further over time for sure. Thanks for the inspiration!

[LacerdaJPF]

Friend
I was searching for a long time a good tutorial on conky and finally I have found it.
Very good explanation, especially the one about the sensors.
Once more Thank you.

[be.barcellos]

Your video tutorial for conky is perfect man! Thanks!

[bertnijhof]

Good explanation from somebody, who uses conky for approx 10 years. With the ${exec....) and ${execbar.... } you can show any values you want. I use those command to display the values of my Vega-8 iGPU and from L1ARC (ZFS mem cache); datapool & dataset sizes of ZFS.

[nbrownie]

Hey Neon just added this to my computer worked thanks for much for the effort and sharing :):) love it.

[TheMoppersmurf]

Great tutorial! Now i can finally adjust it the way i want.
And the links below are also very usefull. Thank you!

[bulcub]

Very good explanation of how to use Conky!

[origenadamantine]

terrific video, thanks Neon! I like the look of your desktop - could you share what wallpaper, theme, etc? And what distro? thanks again

[lfoxkbn]

Thanks @Neon for this wonderful tutorial on conky and elaborate explanation on the inner configuration settings. I've managed to set it up for my hp laptop PC, to correctly display temperature info from the two cores of the CPU and data stream info through the WiFi adapter. I've also set it up to run during system startup which will make it appear at system boot.

However, sometime later it'd always disappear from my Desktop but when I go look in the processor list it'd be right there. So, I'd have to launch it in the terminal and it'd re-appear but then again, it'd disappear later on. If I go check the processor list, I'd then see two instances of the conky application each with its own unique PID. So, I learned I'd get another instance of the application every time I launch it in the terminal. Needless to say, but these many instances of the application would hog computer resources thereby decreasing performance. I thought there's got to be a way to resolve this issue.

Therefore, my questions are: (1) Why would conky display disappear from my Desktop and how can I correct that? (2) If it's impossible to keep it on my Desktop until system shutdown, is there a way to reload conky (using the process that's already created at system startup and lingering in the process list) without launching a fresh instance of it?

And finally, after I launch conky in the Terminal, the following info is returned:

conky: Syntax error unexpected symbol near '#') while reading config file.
conky: Assuming it's in old syntax and attempting conversion.
conky: desktop window (320002d) is subwindow of root window (102)
conky: window type - normal
conky: drawing to created window (0x3a00002)
conky: drawing to double buffer
conky: forked to background, pid is 5343

So, I couldn't figure out to resolve the first line. Is line 3 an error needing to be resolved? How about lines 5 to 7?

Sorry about my too many questions.

[ottodachat]

I found Conky trying to find a Linux program that could give me idle voltages, but none found, however this came up and I really like the ability to configure it, though I do like other linux programs like top or bpytop

Thanks!

[samsneed]

Awesome!!! Thank you so much for your vid and your site...doing great work!!!

[pandeliriumstudio]

Here is a modified variant of the well known "MXKoO" conky... I've added a few items and rearranged as well. Remember that this was configured for my system (Mint), so some pointers to system resources may vary and need to be changed to function.

[hijacking]

conky: Syntax error unexpected symbol near '#') while reading config file.
conky: Assuming it's in old syntax and attempting conversion.
conky: [string "..."]:159: attempt to call a nil value (global 'loadstring')

[MichelePanutsos]

Thank you for the tutorial! A question: how to set a general font for conky information? I was able to change just the title... :(

[alessandrogiusti]

Thank you! very clear and useful tutorial

[MarioMartinez_]

thank you for this amazing tutorial!!!

[phil]

I am getting this response when I run conky on your config file:
conky: Syntax error unexpected symbol near '#') while reading config file.
conky: Assuming it's in old syntax and attempting conversion.
conky: [string "..."]:159: attempt to call a nil value (global 'loadstring')

[arciarcibald]

Hello, first of all, thanks for this video, for beginers like me its great! :) Any ideas why Conky shows used RAM more and more (depend by what Im doing and how long is system runing, no problem showing 15GB / 15, 5GB) and System monitor shows real usage? Thank you

[truant]

Hey any chance you have the new lua syntax for this? If not, nbd, the documentation on arch isn't great but I can figure it out :)

[m.grnk]

Thanks Neon Cipher, Great video.

Also I was wondering how to run many conky scripts at the same time??
Thanks