Conky 1.6.1 on Hardy Heron

Conky 1.6.1 on Hardy Heron

update: also works on Intrepid Ibex!

Step by step howto install Conky 1.6.1 on Ubuntu Hardy Heron.

Conky is a system monitor for X originally based on the torsmo code. Since its original conception, Conky has changed a fair bit from its predecessor. Conky can display just about anything, either on your root desktop or in its own window. Conky has many built-in objects, as well as the ability to execute programs and scripts, then display the output from stdout.

For more information about conky, visit http://conky.sourceforge.net/

Currently in the Hardy repository there is version 1.5.1 available. However, this version does have some issues and there are a lot of fixes between 1.5.1 and 1.6.1.

So I decided to install the latest version from source. Lateron I will describe howto create an deb file from source.

For now you need to install some prerequisite software:

sudo apt-get install libxext-dev libxdamage-dev libglib2.0-dev zlib1g-dev libxft2-dev libiw-dev
  1. </pre>
  2. Download the latest source from the conky website. Untar it and go into source directory. If you want wlan support for using the variables wireless_* then make sure that you enable it like so.
  3. <pre lang="enc__bash">./configure –enable-wlan
  4.  
  5. conky 1.6.1 configured successfully:
  6.  
  7.  Installing into:   /usr/local
  8.  System config dir: ${prefix}|>/etc
  9.  C compiler flags:         -I/usr/include/freetype2   -I/usr/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/lib/glib-2.0/include   -Wall -W
  10.  Linker flags:       -Wl,-O1
  11.  Libraries:         -lrt  -lm -liw  -lX11   -lXext   -lXdamage -lXfixes   -lXft -lfontconfig   -lglib-2.0  
  12.  
  13.  * X11:
  14.   X11 support:      yes
  15.   XDamage support:  yes
  16.   XDBE support:     yes
  17.   Xft support:      yes
  18.  
  19.  * Music detection:
  20.   Audacious:        no
  21.   BMPx:             no
  22.   MPD:              yes
  23.   XMMS2:            no
  24.  
  25.  * General:
  26.   math:             yes
  27.   hddtemp:          yes
  28.   portmon:          yes
  29.   RSS:              no
  30.   wireless:         yes
  31.   SMAPI:            no
  32.   nvidia:           no
  33. eve-online:       no

If you like you can enable other functionalities but you also need to install the dev files. No worries, the configure script will complain when it can not find whats needed!

Now run make to compile source and test it. If you like you can place a copy of mine .conkyrc in your home directory
Try conky by running…

./src/conky -a top_right &

If everything checks out as you predicted ;-) you can run make install to install conky on your system.

Download configuration file. Just rename it to .conkyrc

conkyrc