Conky – a lightweight system monitor

My lightweight choice of a system monitor for Ubuntu is conky but it is a little bit tricky to configure conky in Gnome. The installation is pretty trivial but before we do that we have to edit the „/etc/X11/xorg.conf“ file and put

Load    "dbe"

into the Section „Module“. This line prevented that conky jitters. Now we can install conky and devilspie:

sudo apt-get install conky
sudo apt-get install devilspie

Devil’s pie is a window-matching utility, inspired by Sawfish’s „Matched Windows“ option and the lack of the functionality in Metacity the window manager for Gnome.

You can find a config file for conky here. If you want, download it and rename it to .conkyrc and save it into your home directory. If you want to use your own config file you have to consider to add

own_window yes
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_hints undecorated skip_taskbar skip_pager

to your .conkyrc. Don’t use „own_window_type desktop“ or something like that. It didn’t worked for me so I gues it won’t work for you either.

Next, we have to configure devilspie so it can run together with Gnome:

mkdir ~/.devilspie
touch ~/.devilspie/conky.ds

Edit „conky.ds“ and add the following code:

(if
   (is (application_name) "conky")
   (begin
      (pin)
      (skip_tasklist)
      (skip_pager)
   )
)

Once conky and devilspie are properly configured, you can make them both automatically start together with Gnome. Click „System -> Preferences -> Sessions“ and select „Startup Programs“ . Then click the „Add“ button and add „devilspie“ for the startup command. Click „OK“ and the „Add“ button again to add „conky“. The next time you login, devilspie and conky will automatically start.