I use ubuntu as my daily driver so all the commands are going to be ubuntu/debian based

Installation

Install conky-all package by sudo apt-get install conky-all

Setup

conky takes a config file to know what to draw on screen. the default location of config file is ~/.conkyrc

Run

you can start the conky by just typing conky in terminal, and a and ugly black window should come up.

Customization

There are thousands of options to pick conky config, and if that’s not enough you can just google for more. I’ll add a link to my favorites one here, Conky Orange its 11 years old still looks decent

you can search for more on gnome-look or deviantart

My Conky Configurations

I have 3 conky configs setup for my use, link to configs is here zkhan93/conky

1. System monitor and time

I use a modified version of conky Orange to use with my wallpaper

configs and scripts used are zkhan93/conky/sidebar

2. Quotes

A conky script that shows a quote from a JSON file on disk.

for this I used startup apps in gnome to trigger a python script that downloads a Github gist which contains a bunch of my favorite quotes and pick one randomly. I had to use little bit of Lua since the quote can be arbitrarily long so Lua function takes care of multi line and alignment of text based on the font in use and its size.

[
  {
    "quote": "Patience Ensures Victory.",
    "author": "Ali ibn Abi Talib"
  }
]

content of gist file have the following structure

configs and scripts used are zkhan93/conky/quotes

3. parcel tracking

I want to stay updated on the location of my parcels, so invested some time to set this up so that the latest update on parcel is displayed on my screen. It is a combination of a couple of shell and lua scripts,

  • bin/count.sh - counts the number of items to track
  • bin/parcel_track.sh - Given the tracking number and courier service name it uses tracktry to get latest updates.
  • bin/get_updates.sh - Uses count.sh to loop through each items and call parcel_track.sh for each item
  • draw_status.lua - Uses count.sh and get_updates.sh to get the status and draw the status on screen
  • .conkyrc - calls the draw_status.lua

Tracktry provides free API query credits per month for hobbyist

Raspberry Pi 4,bluedart,8931267875
Aeroplane,bluedart,893114466875

text file contains tracking information

configs and scripts used are zkhan93/conky/parcel