How to install a Conky and Conky Manager on Linux

Conky is a light weight linux program which is a system monitor, similar to Windows Task Manager in Windows. Conky will show you a lot of your linux system’s information on your desktop, for example, cpu usage, cpu usage history, memory usage, disk usage, networking usage and many more. Conky will run on Linux and BSD and it is licensed under the GPL. In this article i will show you how to install, and compile Conky on Linux, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Gentoo, Arch, and Debian.

To install Conky on Ubuntu or Linux Mint

$ sudo apt-get install conky

To install Conky on Gentoo Linux

# emerge app-admin/conky

or

# paludis -i app-admin/conky

To install Conky on Arch Linux

# pacman -S conky

You can also compiling Conky from source pre, to download the lastest Conky, you can visit http://sourceforge.net/projects/conky/files/conky/. The lastest version of Conky by the time I’m writing this article is 1.9.0

Download Conky 1.9.0

$ wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/conky/files/conky/1.9.0/conky-1.9.0.tar.gz

Untar or uncompressed the Conky file you downloaded

$ tar -xzvf conky-1.9.0.tar.gz

Now change your working directory to conky-1.9.0 directory

$ cd conky-1.9.0

To compile conky, you will need the X11 development libraries, or libx11-dev package on debian, ubuntu, linux mint

$ sudo apt-get update && apt-get install libx11-dev

Finally you now can compile conky

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-x11 --enable-mpd # see --help for a full listing of options
$ make
$ su -
# make install

Conky Manger

After installing Conky, you might want to try Conky Manager. Conky Manager helps you to config, start/stop, change conky theme with a graphical front end. You can install Conky Manager on Ubuntu based distributions (xubuntu, kubuntu, linux mint…)

To install a Conky Manager on Ubuntu or Linux Mint

$ sudo apt-add-repository -y ppa:teejee2008/ppa
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install conky-manager