So what is Conky? Conky is a free, light-weight system monitor for X, that displays any kind of information on your desktop and works on Raspberry Pi. It is highly configurable and is able to monitor many system variables including the status of the CPU, memory, swap space, disk storage, temperatures, processes, and much more.
To autostart conky on boot we will need to create 2 files: 1. Will be a shell script to delay the boot process of conky. Will be the conky desktop files to allow lxdesktop to start the shell script. To create the shell script. Sudo nano /usr/bin/conky.sh. Paste this into the conky.sh file #!/bin/sh (sleep 4s && conky) & exit 0. Conky puts 'conky' in front of functionname to prevent accidental calls to the wrong function unless you put you place 'conky' in front of it yourself. Machine: Machine, i686 for example. Wireless access point MAC address (Linux only) wirelessbitrate (net) Wireless bitrate (ie 11 Mb/s) (Linux only) wirelessessid.
Features:
Conky can display more than 300 built-in objects, including support for:
- A plethora of OS stats (uname, uptime, CPU usage, mem usage, disk usage, “top” like process stats, and network monitoring, just to name a few).
- Built-in IMAP and POP3 support.
- Built-in support for many popular music players (MPD, XMMS2, BMPx, Audacious).
- Can be extended using built-in Lua support, or any of your own scripts and programs (more).
- Built-in Imlib2 and Cairo bindings for arbitrary drawing with Lua (more).
- Runs on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, Haiku OS, and macOS and much much more.
There is a great installation guide over at Nova Spirit Tech. I have copied it for your convenience below.
How to Install Conky:
I am sorry to say that there is no GUI install for Conky so we are going to have it install it from the command line. Open a terminal window and copy and paste the BLUE CODE below:
sudo apt-get install conky -y
Now download the conky configuration file
wget -O /home/pi/.conkyrc https://raw.githubusercontent.com/novaspirit/rpi_conky/master/rpi3_conkyrc
To autostart conky on boot we will need to create 2 files:
1. will be a shell script to delay the boot process of conky.
2. will be the conky desktop files to allow lxdesktop to start the shell script
To create the shell script
sudo nano /usr/bin/conky.sh
Paste this into the conky.sh file
#!/bin/sh
(sleep 4s && conky) &
exit 0
(sleep 4s && conky) &
exit 0
Now create the conky.desktop file for the autostart process
sudo nano /etc/xdg/autostart/conky.desktop
Then paste this into the file
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[Desktop Entry]
Name=conky
Type=Application
Exec=sh /usr/bin/conky.sh
Terminal=false
Comment=system monitoring tool.
Categories=Utility;
Name=conky
Type=Application
Exec=sh /usr/bin/conky.sh
Terminal=false
Comment=system monitoring tool.
Categories=Utility;
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The last thing to do is to reboot to make sure everything is working. As you can see from the following picture it is!
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I have included the video below for your step by step installation. In the above picture, I installed it on my Raspberry Pi 3B+. In the video below I installed it on my Raspberry Pi Zero WH.