Conky generic questions

[MurphCID]

These have probably been beaten to death, so forgive me but I have a couple of questions:

1) What is the general system impact of a Conky on the system? 500 mb Ram? 1 gb RAM?
2) I have tried to install and configure Conky before, but I never seem to be able to "break the code" in terms of getting what I want (pretty much what MX linux has out of the box, but with different colors). The menu is obscure to me, so I am uncertain as to the installation method.
3) Does Conky cause any conflicts with say HTOP or other monitoring software that might be running?
4) Is there a good Conky configuration guide out there that is newbie friendly, and has lots of hand holding?

[ShadowSkill]

1. Depends on how many widgets and how complicated each widgets are, but I'm running 5 widgets with a total of just 50ish MiB (looking in System Monitor)
2. For me, I just call a startup script which contains what widgets to use. There is a conky-manager app iirc, but I don't personally use it.
3. I'm not a Linux expert, but I don't think I experienced any monitoring conflicts so far.
4. I don't know any guides like that, but you can take a look at my custom conky theme. I think some of the widgets are quite simple so it'll be easy to know the structure of the .conf files (I break the widgets into smaller ones for readability and easier maintenance). https://github.com/snatrio/Enlighten


Cheers.

[zcot]

There was a thread where I ended up typing out quite a bit of stuff. Just scanning quickly here's 2 posts in it.

The basic setup, and I would suggest installing the conky-manager2 to make it easy on yourself: viewtopic.php?p=1716679#p1716679

and the thread goes on quite a bit but here's another notable post, and I think I described the dirty details of installing the MX configs package at some point: viewtopic.php?p=1799119#p1799119

do that initial setup and then do these terminal commands:

Code: Select all

mkdir ~/.conky
cd .conky

#create text document from man page about configuration settings:
man -P "less -p 'CONFIGURATION SETTINGS'" conky > conky-CONFIGURATION-SETTINGS

#create text document from man page about objects and variables:
man -P "less -p 'OBJECTS/VARIABLES'" conky > conky-OBJECTS-VARIABLES

-now you have the config settings and variables reference in an easy text file there. That makes for easy reference when you need to check something, or you get bored and want to overload more stuff into a config.

[AndyMH]

There is a conky showoff thread:
viewtopic.php?f=212&t=30209
Have a look through it. I think the best way is to find one that is close to what you want and then modify it. It's what I did. Lots of resources on the web, e.g. a list of all variables:
http://conky.sourceforge.net/variables.html

[MurphCID]

I'll give it a shot this weekend, I had to uninstall MX Linux on the old Darter Pro, after constant hard lockups requiring a power button push to shut down since I could not even bring up a terminal. Back to Mint on that older machine. Perhaps something to do with Coreboot and SystemD? I did manage to modify their Conky using the enclosed tools in MX Linux. Somewhat of a success. I like the minimal form here, just a clock, date, and small CPU/RAM/Etc showing, nothing obtrusive.

[zcot]

You can install that MX Conky tool if you like. They're also using the forked conky-manager2 mentioned above. I'm not sure what tool you are referring to but you could install either one easily, or I guess both, with the .deb(at the current moment they are behind a couple of small version changes on the conky-manager2, but 1 important one to me "Open in Terminal").

[Koentje]

I have about 36 conky scripts running with some additional bash and lua scripts that works with them. And about 10 that are started once in a while from bash scripts. One of these scripts is a conkyusage script that calculates how much cpu% and ram they consume. So i can see if one of the scripts goes bonkers!
The 36 running scrips use about 18mb and around 6% cpu. This is including all the libraries they use!

On a i5 6-core with 32gb ram, it's a drop in a pool..