No-Nonsense Guide to Configuring Conky

[ Thanks to Dmitri Popov for this link. ]

"The .conkyrc file consists of two sections: the first one controls Conky's appearance, while the second one determines what data to monitor. To separate these sections, Conky uses the TEXT marker. Since the .conkyrc file is just a plain text file, you can use your favorite text editor to work with it. The very first thing you have to do is to specify the update interval, or how often Conky "collects" the monitored data. This is done by specifying the update_interval option in seconds, for example: update_interval 1.0 or update_interval 3.0. Obviously, the exact value depends on how up-to-date data you need. On my Eee PC, changing the update interval doesn't seem to have any adverse effect on the performance, so I usually set it to 1 second. By default, Conky is designed to superimpose the monitoring data directly onto your desktop (or as Conky's documentation puts it "draw to the root desktop window"). While this looks pretty good, it quite often causes Conky to flicker, which can be quite annoying. Conky has two options to help you to deal with this problem. The double_buffer setting lets Conky use the X double-buffer extension that can eliminate flickering. If enabling double_buffer doesn't help, you can use the own_window option that forces Conky to run in a separate window. To enable these options, add them to the .conkyrc file as follows:"

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