So you have a Gentoo machine, and have already learned 30 different commands to monitor different aspects of what your computer is doing at the current moment. What do you do from here? Isn't there an easier way to monitor system performance and see what its doing, as well as the resources its using to perform all those tasks? This is what a system monitor, such as Conky, provides.
Unlike other system monitors such as top, Conky can run as a window in an X session, or by drawing to the root window (there is also an option to have Conky display information to stdout, but we won't discuss that here). It displays the information it has gathered through the use of both text, progress bars, and graphs. Also unlike top, the way it is formatted is completely user-configurable. In addition to monitoring the system itself, Conky can also give you information about several music players (such as XMMS, Music Player Daemon, and Audacious Media Player), tell you how many new messages are in your mail spool, and plenty more. If the functionality you require isn't in Conky yet, it is a simple matter of writing a script to get the information you would like - some examples of this, which have already been done are RSS feeds, POP3 e-mail message count, local weather, boinc status, and even the status of portage.
Gentoo provides an ebuild to quickly and easily install
Conky. Pay particular attention to the the USE flags. You'll
most likely want X11 support (
# Example line to append to /etc/portage/package.use if you don't want the default USE flags. app-admin/conky xmms infopipe -ipv6
In addition, the
Once you have your USE flags correctly set up, it's time to install Conky!
emerge -av conky
You can test Conky to see how it will look by running the
command
$ conky
Once you have an idea of how Conky looks, you can now move on to configuring it!
By default, Conky will look for a configuration file in the
users home directory located at
$ mkdir -p ~/.config/conky $ zcat /usr/share/conky-1.6.0/conkyrc.sample.gz >> ~/.config/conky/conky.conf
Now, open up the sample configuration in the text editor of
your choice. You may notice that there are two seperate
sections of the configuration file. The first section of the
file, contains the programs configuration options and controls
how it acts. This includes things such as the
Lists of all the available configuration options and
variables are kept at
So you've gotten this far, and have scoured the Conky
documentation for that extra variable which Conky just doesn't
seem to have... You're in luck! Conky provides several
variables for just this reason!
${exec grep 'sudo' /var/log/messages | tail -n 4} ${execi 30 ~/scripts/emerge-status.sh ${texeci 600 ~/scripts/gmail.pl}