conky/doc/docs.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE refentry PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.4//EN"
"http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.4/docbookx.dtd"
[
<!ENTITY command_options SYSTEM "command_options.xml">
<!ENTITY config_settings SYSTEM "config_settings.xml">
<!ENTITY variables SYSTEM "variables.xml">
<!ENTITY lua SYSTEM "lua.xml">
]>
<refentry>
	<refentryinfo>
		<address>
			<email>brenden1@users.sourceforge.net</email>
		</address>
		<author>
			<firstname>Brenden</firstname>
			<surname>Matthews</surname>
		</author>
		<date>2009-07-31</date>
	</refentryinfo>
	<refmeta>
		<refentrytitle>conky</refentrytitle>
		<manvolnum>1</manvolnum>
	</refmeta>
	<refnamediv>
		<refname>conky</refname>
		<refpurpose>A system monitor for X originally based on the
			torsmo code, but more kickass. It just keeps on given'er.
			Yeah.</refpurpose>
	</refnamediv>
	<refsynopsisdiv>
		<cmdsynopsis>
			<command>conky</command>
			<arg>
				<replaceable>options</replaceable>
			</arg>
		</cmdsynopsis>
	</refsynopsisdiv>
	<refsect1>
		<title>Description</title>
		<para>Conky is a system monitor for X originally based on
			torsmo. Since its inception, Conky has changed
			significantly from its predecessor, while maintaining
			simplicity and configurability. Conky can display just
			about anything, either on your root desktop or in its own
			window. Not only does Conky have many built-in objects, it
			can also display just about any piece of information by
			using scripts and other external programs.
		</para>
		<para>Conky has more than 250 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), and much much more.
			Conky can display this info either as text, or using simple
			progress bars and graph widgets, with different fonts and
			colours.
		</para>
		<para>We are always looking for help, whether its reporting
			bugs, writing patches, or writing docs. Please use the
			facilities at SourceForge to make bug reports, feature
			requests, and submit patches, or stop by #conky on
			irc.freenode.net if you have questions or want to
			contribute.</para>
		<para>Thanks for your interest in Conky.
		</para>
	</refsect1>
	<refsect1>
		<title>Compiling</title>
		<para>For users compiling from source on a binary distro,
			make sure you have the X development libraries installed
			(Unless you provide configure with "--disable-x11"). This
			should be a package along the lines of "libx11-dev" or
			"xorg-x11-dev" for X11 libs, and similar "-dev" format for
			the other libs required (depending on your configure
			options). You should be able to see which extra packages
			you need to install by reading errors that you get from
			'./configure'. You can enable/disable stuff by giving
			options to configure, but be careful with disabling. For
			example: with --disable-math you won't get errors but
			logarithmic graphs will be normal graphs and gauges
			will miss their line. 
		</para>
		<para>Conky has (for some time) been available in the
			repositories of most popular distributions. Here are some
			installation instructions for a few:
		</para>
		<para>Gentoo users -- Conky is in Gentoo's Portage...
			simply use "emerge app-admin/conky" for
			installation.
		</para>
		<para>Debian, etc. users -- Conky should be in your
			repositories, and can be installed by doing "aptitude
			install conky".
		</para>
		<para>Example to compile and run Conky with all optional
			components (note that some configure options may differ for
			your system):
		</para>
		<variablelist>
			<varlistentry>
				<term>
					<command>
						<option>sh autogen.sh</option>
					</command>
					<option># Only required if building from the
						git repo</option>
				</term>
			</varlistentry>
			<varlistentry>
				<term>
					<command>
						<option>./configure</option>
					</command>
					<option>--prefix=/usr --mandir=/usr/share/man
						--infodir=/usr/share/info --datadir=/usr/share
						--sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var/lib
						--disable-own-window
						--enable-audacious[=yes|no|legacy]
						--enable-bmpx --disable-hddtemp --disable-mpd
						--enable-xmms2 --disable-portmon
						--disable-network --enable-debug --disable-x11
						--disable-double-buffer --disable-xdamage
						--disable-xft</option>
				</term>
			</varlistentry>
			<varlistentry>
				<term>
					<command>
						<option>make</option>
					</command>
				</term>
			</varlistentry>
			<varlistentry>
				<term>
					<command>
						<option>make install</option>
					</command>
					<option># Optional</option>
				</term>
			</varlistentry>
			<varlistentry>
				<term>
					<command>
						<option>src/conky</option>
					</command>
				</term>
			</varlistentry>
		</variablelist>
		<para>Conky has been tested to be compatible with C99 C,
			however it has not been tested with anything other than
			gcc, and is not guaranteed to work with other
			compilers.
		</para>
		<para></para>
	</refsect1>
	<refsect1>
		<title>You Should Know</title>
		<para>Conky is generally very good on resources. That said,
			the more you try to make Conky do, the more resources it is
			going to consume.
		</para>
		<para>An easy way to force Conky to reload your ~/.conkyrc:
			"killall -SIGUSR1 conky". Saves you the trouble of having
			to kill and then restart. You can now also do the same with
			SIGHUP.
		</para>
	</refsect1>
	<refsect1>
		<title>Options</title>
		<para>Command line options override configurations defined in
			configuration file.
		</para>
		&command_options;
	</refsect1>
	<refsect1>
		<title>Configuration Settings</title>
		<para>Default configuration file location is $HOME/.conkyrc or
			${sysconfdir}/conky/conky.conf. On most systems, sysconfdir is
			/etc, and you can find the sample config file there
			(/etc/conky/conky.conf).
		</para>
		<para>You might want to copy it to $HOME/.conkyrc and then
			start modifying it. Other configs can be found at
			http://conky.sf.net/
		</para>
		&config_settings;
	</refsect1>
	<refsect1>
		<title>Objects/Variables</title>
		<para>Colours are parsed using XParsecolor(), there might be a
			list of them: /usr/share/X11/rgb.txt. 
			Colour can be also in
			#rrggbb format (hex).
		</para>
		<para>
			Some objects may create threads, and sometimes these threads will
			not be destroyed until Conky terminates.  There is no way to
			destroy or clean up threads while Conky is running.  For example,
			if you use an MPD variable, the MPD thread will keep running until
			Conky dies.  Some threaded objects will use one of the parameters
			as a 'key', so that you only have 1 relevant thread running (for
			example, the $curl, $rss and $weather objects launch one thread per
			URI).
		</para>
		&variables;
	</refsect1>
	<refsect1>
		<title>Lua API</title>
		<para>Conky features a Lua Programming API, and also ships with
			some Lua bindings for some useful libraries. Conky defines
			certain global functions and variables which can be accessed
			from Lua code running in Conky.
		</para>
		<para>To use Lua Conky, you first need to make sure you have a version of Conky
			with Lua support enabled (``conky -v'' will report this).  Scripts
			must first be loaded using the lua_load configuration option.  You
			then call functions in Lua via Conky's $lua, $lua_read, and Lua
			hooks.
		</para>
		<para>
			Be careful when creating threaded objects through the Lua API.  You
			could wind up with a whole bunch of threads running if a thread is
			created with each iteration.
		</para>
		<para>
			At this time, the Lua API should not be considered stable and may
			change drastically from one release to another as it matures.
		</para>
		&lua;
	</refsect1>
	<refsect1>
		<title>Examples</title>
		<variablelist>
			<varlistentry>
				<term>
					<varname>conky</varname>
					<option>-t '${time %D %H:%M}' -o -u 30</option>
				</term>
				<listitem>Start Conky in its own window with date
					and clock as text and 30 sec update
					interval.</listitem>
			</varlistentry>
			<varlistentry>
				<term>
					<varname>conky</varname>
					<option>-a top_left -x 5 -y 500 -d</option>
				</term>
				<listitem>Start Conky to background at coordinates
					(5, 500).</listitem>
			</varlistentry>
			<varlistentry>
				<term>
					<varname>conky</varname>
					<option>-C &gt; ~/.conkyrc</option>
				</term>
				<listitem>Do not start Conky, but have it output
					the builtin default config file to ~/.conkyrc for
					later customising.</listitem>
			</varlistentry>
		</variablelist>
	</refsect1>
	<refsect1>
		<title>Files</title>
		<variablelist>
			<varlistentry>
				<term>
					<filename>
						${sysconfdir}/conky/conky.conf</filename>
				</term>
				<listitem>Default system-wide configuration file.
					The value of ${sysconfdir} depends on the
					compile-time options (most likely /etc).</listitem>
			</varlistentry>
			<varlistentry>
				<term>
					<filename>~/.conkyrc</filename>
				</term>
				<listitem>Default personal configuration
					file.</listitem>
			</varlistentry>
		</variablelist>
	</refsect1>
	<refsect1>
		<title>Bugs</title>
		<para>Drawing to root or some other desktop window directly
			doesn't work with all window managers. Especially doesn't
			work well with Gnome and it has been reported that it
			doesn't work with KDE either. Nautilus can be disabled from
			drawing to desktop with program gconf-editor. Uncheck
			show_desktop in /apps/nautilus/preferences/. There is -w
			switch in Conky to set some specific window id. You might
			find xwininfo -tree useful to find the window to draw to.
			You can also use -o argument which makes Conky to create
			its own window. If you do try running Conky in its own
			window, be sure to read up on the own_window_type settings
			and experiment.</para>
	</refsect1>
	<refsect1>
		<title>See Also</title>
		<para>
			<ulink url="http://conky.sourceforge.net/">
				http://conky.sourceforge.net/</ulink>
		</para>
		<para>
			<ulink url="http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/conky">
				http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/conky</ulink>
		</para>
		<para>
			<ulink url="http://wiki.conky.be">
				http://wiki.conky.be</ulink>
		</para>
		<para>#conky on irc.freenode.net</para>
	</refsect1>
	<refsect1>
		<title>Copying</title>
		<para>Copyright (c) 2005-2009 Brenden Matthews, Philip
			Kovacs, et. al. Any original torsmo code is licensed under
			the BSD license (see LICENSE.BSD for a copy). All code
			written since the fork of torsmo is licensed under the GPL
			(see LICENSE.GPL for a copy), except where noted
			differently (such as in portmon code, timed thread code,
			and audacious code which are LGPL, and prss which is an
			MIT-style license).</para>
	</refsect1>
	<refsect1>
		<title>Authors</title>
		<para>The Conky dev team (see AUTHORS for a full list of
			contributors).</para>
	</refsect1>
</refentry>