Conky, a very light system monitor

In Gnu / Linux distributions, as in other systems, there are system monitors that show us the operation of our machine. In Gnu / Linux, unlike many others, there is a very light system monitor that sits on the desktop and does not consume as many resources as applets or a complete program. This system monitor is called Conky and it is found in the main Gnu / Linux distributions.

Conky is a system monitor that is configured with a plain text file. In this plain text file we indicate the parameters that we want to control and they will be displayed on the desktop as if it were part of the wallpaper. Conky development has been very active over the last few years so recently we have new outlier features for a system monitor.

These functions are calendar, email tray, rss reader or music player among other things. To use this, you do not need anything more than to handle the Conky configuration file and that's it.

Conky installation

Conky is in the main distributions so to install it just use the standard installation method. So in Debian we will have to use aptitude, in Ubuntu apt-get, in Gentoo emerge, in ArchLinux pacman, etc ... To know if our distro has it in its official repositories we can visit the project website to check it and if not, we will have on that website the files to install it and its instructions.

Conky Configuration

Once we have installed Conky we will have to go to the .conkyrc file to configure it. This file will be in our home and can be freely modified. On the official website we will find a section called "Documentation" with all the parameters and their functions. Now, in the network there are many configurations to which we can copy and paste in our .conkyrc file to have the same appearance and function.

Finally, when we finish the configuration, we must not forget to insert the conky command as one of the applications that is loaded at the start of the system, otherwise the system monitor will not work until we execute it. It is a simple operation although to do it will depend on the distribution.

Conclusion

Conky is one of the best system monitors if not the best there is. Its functionality is great and once we know how it works, its use is simple. Now, there are many who prefer not to waste resources with this application or simply do not want to know the details of its available resources. Hence it is not seen in all systems, although we can change it.