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4 <!ENTITY testtable SYSTEM "test.xml">
5 <!ENTITY command_options SYSTEM "command_options.xml">
6 <!ENTITY config_settings SYSTEM "config_settings.xml">
7 <!ENTITY variables SYSTEM "variables.xml">
13 <email>brenden1@users.sourceforge.net</email>
16 <firstname>Brenden</firstname>
17 <surname>Matthews</surname>
19 <date>2009-05-16</date>
23 <refentrytitle>conky</refentrytitle>
24 <manvolnum>1</manvolnum>
28 <refname>conky</refname>
29 <refpurpose>A system monitor for X originally based on the torsmo code, but more kickass. It just keeps on given'er. Yeah.</refpurpose>
34 <command>conky</command>
35 <arg><replaceable>options</replaceable></arg>
40 <title>Description</title>
42 Conky is a system monitor for X originally based on torsmo.
43 Since its inception, Conky has changed significantly from its predecessor, while maintaining
44 simplicity and configurability. Conky can display just about anything, either
45 on your root desktop or in its own window. Not only does Conky have many
46 built-in objects, it can also display just about any piece of information by
47 using scripts and other external programs.
50 Conky has more than 250 built in objects, including support for
51 a plethora of OS stats (uname, uptime, CPU usage, mem usage, disk
52 usage, "top" like process stats, and network monitoring, just to name a few),
53 built in IMAP and POP3 support, built in support for many popular
54 music players (MPD, XMMS2, BMPx, Audacious), and much much more.
55 Conky can display this info either as text, or using simple progress
56 bars and graph widgets, with different fonts and colours.
59 We are always looking for help, whether its reporting bugs, writing patches, or writing docs.
60 Please use the facilities at SourceForge to make bug reports, feature requests, and submit patches,
61 or stop by #conky on irc.freenode.net if you have questions or want to contribute.
64 Thanks for your interest in Conky.
69 <title>Compiling</title>
71 For users compiling from source on a binary distro, make sure you have the X development
72 libraries installed. This should be a package along the lines of "libx11-dev" or
73 "xorg-x11-dev" for X11 libs, and similar "-dev" format for the other libs required (depending
74 on your configure options).
77 Conky has (for some time) been available in the repositories of most popular distributions.
78 Here are some installation instructions for a few:
81 Gentoo users -- Conky is in Gentoo's Portage... simply use "emerge app-admin/conky" for installation.
84 Debian, etc. users -- Conky should be in your repositories, and can be installed by doing
85 "aptitude install conky".
88 Example to compile and run Conky with all optional components (note that some configure options may differ for your system):
93 <command><option>sh autogen.sh</option></command> <option># Only required if building from the git repo</option>
98 <command><option>./configure </option></command><option>--prefix=/usr --mandir=/usr/share/man --infodir=/usr/share/info --datadir=/usr/share --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var/lib --disable-own-window --enable-audacious[=yes|no|legacy] --enable-bmpx --disable-hddtemp --disable-mpd --enable-xmms2 --disable-portmon --disable-network --enable-debug --disable-x11 --disable-double-buffer --disable-xdamage --disable-xft</option>
103 <command><option>make</option></command>
108 <command><option>make install</option></command> <option># Optional</option>
113 <command><option>src/conky</option></command>
118 Conky has been tested to be compatible with C99 C, however it has not been tested
119 with anything other than gcc, and is not guaranteed to work with other compilers.
129 <title>You Should Know</title>
131 Conky is generally very good on resources. That said, the more you try to make Conky
132 do, the more resources it is going to consume.
135 An easy way to force Conky to reload your ~/.conkyrc: "killall -SIGUSR1 conky".
136 Saves you the trouble of having to kill and then restart. You can now also do the same with SIGHUP.
141 <title>Options</title>
143 <para>Command line options override configurations defined in configuration file.</para>
150 <title>Configuration Settings</title>
153 Default configuration file location is $HOME/.conkyrc or
154 ${sysconfdir}/conky/conky.conf. On most systems, sysconfdir is /etc,
155 and you can find the sample config file there (/etc/conky/conky.conf).
158 You might want to copy it to $HOME/.conkyrc and then start modifying it.
159 Other configs can be found at http://conky.sf.net/
166 <title>Variables</title>
169 Colors are parsed using XParsecolor(), there might be a list of them:
170 /usr/share/X11/rgb.txt. Also, <ulink url="http://sedition.com/perl/rgb.html">
171 http://sedition.com/perl/rgb.html</ulink>.
172 Color can be also in #rrggbb format (hex).
179 <title>Examples</title>
183 <term><varname>conky </varname><option>-t '${time %D %H:%M}' -o -u 30</option></term>
184 <listitem>Start Conky in its own window with date and clock as text and 30 sec update interval.</listitem>
188 <term><varname>conky </varname><option>-a top_left -x 5 -y 500 -d</option></term>
189 <listitem>Start Conky to background at coordinates (5, 500).</listitem>
193 <term><varname>conky </varname><option>-C > ~/.conkyrc</option></term>
194 <listitem>Do not start Conky, but have it output the builtin default config file to ~/.conkyrc for later customising.</listitem>
204 <term><filename>${sysconfdir}/conky/conky.conf</filename></term>
205 <listitem>Default system-wide configuration file. The value of ${sysconfdir} depends on the compile-time options (most likely /etc).</listitem>
208 <term><filename>~/.conkyrc</filename></term>
209 <listitem>Default personal configuration file.</listitem>
217 Drawing to root or some other desktop window directly doesn't work with
218 all window managers. Especially doesn't work well with Gnome and it has
219 been reported that it doesn't work with KDE either. Nautilus can be
220 disabled from drawing to desktop with program gconf-editor. Uncheck
221 show_desktop in /apps/nautilus/preferences/. There is -w switch in Conky
222 to set some specific window id. You might find xwininfo -tree useful to
223 find the window to draw to. You can also use -o argument which makes
224 Conky to create its own window. If you do try running Conky in its own
225 window, be sure to read up on the own_window_type settings and experiment.
230 <title>See Also</title>
231 <para><ulink url="http://conky.sourceforge.net/">
232 http://conky.sourceforge.net/</ulink></para>
233 <para><ulink url="http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/conky">
234 http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/conky</ulink></para>
236 #conky on irc.freenode.net
241 <title>Copying</title>
243 Copyright (c) 2005-2009 Brenden Matthews, Philip Kovacs, et. al.
244 Any original torsmo code is licensed under the BSD license (see LICENSE.BSD for a copy).
245 All code written since the fork of torsmo is licensed under the GPL (see LICENSE.GPL for a copy), except where noted differently (such as in portmon code, timed thread code, and audacious code which are LGPL, and prss which is an MIT-style license).
249 <title>Authors</title>
251 The Conky dev team (see AUTHORS for a full list of contributors).