Apparently, my panel shadow = a desktop icon?!

So, I recently did a clean install of Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat. It went really smoothly, done and dusted in less than half an hour! As it turns out, I probably didn't have to do it...

One of the main reasons I decided to do a clean install was because no matter what I did, if I had desktop effects turned on, I couldn't get a drop shadow on my panel. I know, pretty obsessive-compulsive, that just the lack of a single drop-shadow would make me reinstall, but hey. You should know by now how desperately perfectionistic I am when it comes to my desktop!

Today, I learned that I probably didn't need to do it at all.

One of the first things I noticed about my new install was that icons showed up on my desktop when I mounted external drives. Since I usually have Conky sitting on my desktop, I don't like icons because they don't play nice with the Conky window. I know there's a way to turn off desktop icons with gconf-editor, but I couldn't remember what it was, and I couldn't be bothered to look it up, so laziness prompted me to install Ubuntu Tweak. I had Ubuntu Tweak on my last install and found it really helpful, so I figured there was probably a setting in there to turn off desktop icons. And I was right; in fact, "Desktop Icons" have their own shortcut! But look what happened when I went to turn them off:

Icons on

Icons off

For some insane reason, when I turn off desktop icons, my drop shadow disappears! Which begs the question: if I had tweaked that setting in my old install, would I have got my drop shadow back? And whose bug is this? Compiz? Gnome? Ubuntu?

So for the time being, icons are "turned on," but I've unticked all the options in Ubuntu Tweak, so it effectively doesn't show anything.  How this will interact with Conky, I don't know, since I haven't updated my Conky yet.  I will keep you updated...

Sneak Preview of Conky 1.8.0

So...

I was tipped off whilst trolling the #conky channel on IRC that there would be new ARGB support in the 1.8.0 release candidate of Conky, so naturally I HAAAAD to try it out! I grabbed the latest version from here, and had a go...

First things first, I wanted to try out ARGB, in other words, REAL transparency, as opposed to pseudotransparency. For those of you who don't know the difference, pseudotransparency, rather than actually being see-through, detects what's drawn on the desktop window, and draws it as the Conky background, so it appears, on a blank desktop, as though it's clear. However, as we've seen before, pseudotransparency can cause some hiccups, if you're expecting it to behave like real transparency. It's a particular problem in KDE, for instance, which doesn't draw anything to the desktop window by default, so Conky ends up with a blank background.

In order to test the ARGB functionality, I made a little widget in Lua/Cairo that would be able to sit on top of my other windows, and here's what it came out as:

From My Little Desktop Photos

Note how you can see the corner of my window *through* the Conky widget...That's ARGB!

Some of you eagle-eyed readers may also have noticed that I said I used Lua/Cairo to draw the widget, but the last time I posted about text manipulation in Cairo, I was frustrated by the lack of a cairo_text_extents() object, which allows for centering and alignment of text. But it's now been compiled into the Cairo bindings Conky uses, so from v1.8.0, you'll be able to use it. The desktop I'm currently using has only Conky widgets on it:

From Screenshots

With the current setup, I'm starting to wonder what the benefits are of using Conky over Screenlets...I first thought that it would actually be more efficient to use Screenlets, because I thought they were compiled, but some clever clog pointed out to me that they are written in Python, so not compiled! I think the only barrier to Conky completely taking over Screenlets' territory now is the user-friendliness of Screenlets...Hm...

Memory usage with imlib2 for Lua

I recently started working with imlib2 bindings for Lua as part of the work I'm doing with learning the whole Cairo thing...Please see my latest post over on the Conky Blog.

However, I ran into an interesting problem when I was writing that script, not having written anything with imlib2 bindings before! As I was testing my photo album script, I found that I had a memory leak...The longer I left my script to run, the more and more my memory usage would ramp up until it topped out and I found I couldn't display any more photos. Eep! Not really what you want from a photo album.

So I thought I'd share with you a little bit about how imlib2 draws pictures, as opposed to the way Cairo does it, because having had a bit of experience with Cairo actually led me to think about image drawing in a way that made it difficult to work with imlib2, because the two are so different.

First of all, why use imlib2 at all when you can, to some extent, use Cairo to draw pictures? Well, the reason I turned my hand to it was because I wanted to be able to render .jpg images in my Conky, and the Cairo bindings we use can only interpret .png at the moment, through cairo_image_surface_create_from_png(...). By contrast, if you load an image using imlib2, it auto-detects the type and scans its own internal libraries to find a suitable decoder. So imlib2 has a much broader range of image type support, with no fiddling.

If you want to manipulate existing images in imlib2, first you need to load the image into memory with imlib_load_image(...). Eventually, if you want to then draw that image onto the Conky window, you'll use the imlib_render_image_on_drawable(...) function. However, if you want to manipulate that image first, you will need to do all your manipulation on a "buffer" image before you render it onto the surface.

Now, I'm not very good (yet!) at working with transformations in Cairo, so I'm used to thinking of things like a plotter...Move to (a, b), draw a line to (x, y) and stroke. So when I want to draw an image to a window, what I really want to do is load an image, select the rectangle to draw it into, and then "fill" it in...But that's not really the way to do it with imlib2. My example will be my photo album script...Essentially, I wanted to load an image and draw it onto the Conky window at a set (smaller) size. However, I found that if I just load the image and then draw the image at a smaller size using the following:

imlib_blend_image_onto_image(image, 0, 0, 0, w_img, h_img, 0, 0, width, height)
imlib_render_image_on_drawable(xc - width/2, yc - height/2)

I wound up with a horrific memory leak...Basically, I was loading the images into memory and LEAVING THEM THERE. AT FULL SIZE. Ouch.

(For those of you who are wondering, the lines above shrink the image from w_img x h_img down to a specified width x height, then draw it on the Conky window at the coordinates in the second line...)

What you need to do to avoid the memory leak is to very carefully manage your memory usage by freeing your images after you're done with them. The good way, then, to draw my reduced images onto the Conky window is to use the following method:

image = imlib_load_image(album_dir .. filename)
if image == nil then return end
imlib_context_set_image(image)

w_img, h_img = imlib_image_get_width(), imlib_image_get_height()
buffer = imlib_create_image(width, height)
imlib_context_set_image(buffer)

imlib_blend_image_onto_image(image, 0, 0, 0, w_img, h_img, 0, 0, width, height)
imlib_context_set_image(image)
imlib_free_image()

imlib_context_set_image(buffer)
imlib_render_image_on_drawable(xc - width/2, yc - height/2)
imlib_free_image()

This code does the following:

1. loads the given image into memory, in a variable called "image"
2. checks to see if the image has loaded successfully; if not, breaks out of the function
3. sets the imlib2 context to be "image"
4. grabs the dimensions of the loaded image
5. creates a "buffer" image
6. sets the context to be "buffer", so we can blend onto it
7. draws a scaled-down version of the image onto "buffer"
8. sets the context back to "image", so we can release it
9. releases the original loaded image, so we are then just left with the scaled down version, still held in memory
10. sets the context back to "buffer", so we can draw what's on it onto the drawable window
11. draws whatever's in "buffer" onto the Conky window
12. releases the buffer image

You can start to see from this how you can also use the buffer image (or a series of them!) to do some fairly sophisticated image & text manipulation before rendering onto the drawable window.

For more information on the functions available to you in imlib2, check out their documentation.

In the meantime, here, have a screenie :)

From Screenshots

You can also grab the script that made it, from the Conky Blog, or my DevArt account.

Argh. My first snag with my lovely Lua/Cairo!

So I've been working on making a lovely little eye-candy calendar widget to display with my Conky Widgets script, but I ran into a snag...Here's the best version I got before giving up (for now!):

From My Little Desktop Photos

Can you spot the annoyingness yet?

The text is misaligned!

As it turns out, Cairo draws text from an anchor point roughly at the lower left corner of the text being displayed. In this code, the month name/year, days of the week and day numbers are all evenly spaced on a square grid, but they look uneven because they are anchored at that lower-left position.

What I really want is for each element to be centered in a block. So the month/year is centered in a block that spans the top of the widget, and each of the day numbers is centered in a small square, like on a printed calendar.

However, in Cairo, you can't change where a text element is anchored, but you CAN use a function called cairo_text_extents() to give you some size information about the text block you want to manipulate, and then move to an appropriate start point. (See the Cairo tutorial for a more detailed explanation.)

I must have spent hours trying to get this function to work before I finally gave in and asked the Conky devs...and got this response: "tolua++ doesn't export any creation functions (or constructors) for C structures, only C++ classes." Basically, the third argument in the cairo_text_extents() function is of the structure cairo_text_extents_t, which isn't recognised by Lua.

All this roughly translated: as it stands now, we can't do any sophisticated text manipulation using Cairo in Lua. Booooo.

So the calendar is going to one side for the time being. Incidentally, if you would like to grab the Lua code for this widget, here you go.

Finally! CPU temps in Conky on the Acer Aspire One!

OMIGOD YOU GUYS!!!

I gave up on getting CPU temps in Conky (on my Acer Aspire One netbook) ages ago. Something to do with hardware incompatibility with lm-sensors, or acpi or something...Anyway, I never figured it out.

But after trawling through the Crunchbang forums in search of why I couldn't manage to compile the acerhdf module...I discovered how to find my CPU temp! Once I got acerhdf to compile (it turns out that I hadn't installed the headers for my Linux kernel, so the make was crashing out), I followed the instructions on this post to display the current CPU temp.

All you have to do is type

cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp

in a terminal, and it outputs the CPU temp in degrees C.

To use this in Conky, just use

${exec cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp}

Happy Conkying!

A quick explanation to the Conky packages in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

Hi all...

If you currently use the Conky package from the Jaunty repos, you'll be on version 1.6.1. The latest release is now 1.7.2, and is available in the Karmic repos.

However, there are now four versions of Conky in the Karmic repos! I thought I'd give you a quick guide, so you know which one to use so you get the most out of your favourite desktop monitor.

First of all: why are there so many versions now? It does seem a little excessive! However, according to Cesare Tirabassi, the Ubuntu maintainer for Conky, "One package was really not adequate anymore to satisfy the needs of all conky users. Some users want to have as many features as possible enabled, others as little as possible, some others are happy with what is enabled by default upstream. I therefore changed the packaging for karmic: now we have 3 possible flavours of conky available." (Those three flavours are represented by four packages in the repos, one of which will eventually be deprecated.)

The four versions now available are:

• conky
• conky-all
• conky-cli
• conky-std

(First, I should point out that conky and conky-all are actually the same install...conky is in reality just a metapackage that will install the conky-all package. It is there to protect users currently using the repo conky package from upgrading and having things break. From Cesare: "Its there to avoid that people upgrade and end up with things not working anymore. Users upgrading from previous versions of Ubuntu will be upgraded to the conky-all package via this transitional package; in fact this package does nothing, it only installs the conky-all package and it can be safely removed after upgrading.")

From the package documentation, here is a brief explanation of the differences between the packages:

conky-cli:

conky-cli is a basic package that can be useful in servers or piped with dzen2.

It includes the following support:

MPD, MOC, math, apcupsd and I/O stats

conky-std:

conky-std should be a good compromise for most users that do not need special features.

It includes the following support:

X11, XDamage, XDBE, Xft, MPD, MOC, math, hddtemp, portmon, wireless, ALSA mixer, apcupsd, I/O stats and lua

conky-all:

conky-all includes almost all of the available support:

X11, XDamage, XDBE, Xft, MPD, MOC, math, hddtemp, portmon, RSS, curl, Weather (METAR and XOAP), wireless, IBM, nvidia, eve-online, Imlib2, ALSA mixer, apcupsd, I/O stats, Lua and Lua bindings for the cairo and imlib2 libraries

It is highly advised that you upgrade to one of these packages as soon as you can, as the conky metapackage will eventually be removed.

If you haven't tried Lua/Cairo yet, you're missing out!

Wow. So, it's been a while, huh? Well, don't you worry, I've been busy. I started teaching myself Lua, so I could do some scripting with the new Cairo bindings.

I've done a little Getting Started Guide over at the Conky Blog, and I've done some scripts, which are posted over at Conky Hardcore. If you haven't tried it yet, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT!!! Here are some screenies to whet your appetite :)

From Screenshots

From Screenshots

From Screenshots

From Screenshots

...All done with Conky, and only Conky :)

$image size vs. $image resizing, and a Simple Way to Make Conky Monitor Itself

Subbass recently made a comment on the Official Conky Blog that got me thinking: is it more efficient for Conky to resize an image in every iteration or for it to display an image "straight", without resizing it? Okay, seems like an obvious answer, but it raised the more interesting question: can you get Conky to display CPU and memory usage, but just for itself? It would be incredibly useful for us experimental types, to understand how we can make our Conkys more lightweight (given that the whole ethos of Conky to begin with is "a LIGHTWEIGHT system monitor").

With the help of dk75 and mobilediesel, I came up with the following, which uses ps to give the time-averaged CPU and memory usage of your Conky process(es):

${execpi 1 ps ux | grep -w conky | grep -v grep | awk '{print "CPU ",$3,"% MEM ",$4,"%"}'}

The important thing to note is that because it uses ps, the output is time-averaged over the entire life of the process. This is different to top, which shows the information since the last iteration of top. (Check the relevant man pages for more information.) Both programs have their uses; in the case of comparing the relative efficiency of different .conkyrcs, I find the ps method the most suitable. Incidentally, if you want to use top instead, you can use:

${execi 1 top -b -n1 -p $(pidof conky |awk '{gsub(" ", ",", $0); print}') |awk '/conky/ {print "CPU:",$9"%","MEM:",$10"%"}'}

The Test
I created three .conkyrc files, based on this one (my original config that was written for the Conky blog):

TEXT
${image ~/images/bk_semi_trans_sq.png -p 3,5 -s 40x40}${image ~/images/bk_semi_trans_sq.png -p 47,5 -s 40x40}${image ~/images/bk_semi_trans_sq.png -p 91,5 -s 40x40}${image ~/images/bk_semi_trans_sq.png -p 135,5 -s 40x40}
${if_match ${desktop}==1}${image ~/images/wh_sq.png -p 3,5 -s 40x40}${endif}${if_match ${desktop}==2}${image ~/images/wh_sq.png -p 47,5 -s 40x40}${endif}${if_match ${desktop}==3}${image ~/images/wh_sq.png -p 91,5 -s 40x40}${endif}${if_match ${desktop}==4}${image ~/images/wh_sq.png -p 135,5 -s 40x40}${endif}
${execpi 1 ps ux | grep -w conky | grep -v grep | awk '{print "CPU ",$3,"% MEM ",$4,"%"}'}

Versions 2 and 3 were, respectively, using a set of 40x40px images and no resizing, and using a set of 10x10px images with resizing.

I ran each Conky for 10 minutes on its own, and at the end of the 10 minutes, took a screenshot capturing the CPU and memory percents.

Version 1, 50x50px images, scaled down to 40x40px, CPU 13.4% and MEM 1.0%:

From My Little Desktop Photos

Version 2, 40x40px images, no resizing, CPU 9.3% and MEM 1.0%:

From My Little Desktop Photos

Version 3, 10x10px images, scaled up to 40x40px, CPU 11.2% and MEM 1.0%:

From My Little Desktop Photos

In summary, it is most efficient to use the correctly-sized images for your Conky. However, if you must scale your images, best to use smaller images and scale up, rather than bigger ones scaled down.

I should note, that the CPU and memory percentages are obviously dependent on my system, which is just a little netbook, so forgive me if they seem prohibitively high! Also, you can improve the performance of this particular Conky greatly by increasing the update_interval; I was using 0.1s because I wanted my desktop indicator to switch quickly upon desktop change. However, if you're happy with a bit of a lag, you can always change it to 0.5s or 1s.

A cheap little battery widget :)

I liked my last battery widget, but it was a bit resource-hungry, what with all the images and that...So in a previous Conky config, I came up with a quick and easy way to get a battery-widget-like-thing, by using two battery bars, one of which was for a battery that doesn't exist (so it always shows empty).

I used:

${battery_bar 40,165 BAT1}${voffset 10}${battery_bar 20,10 BAT2}

to get this:

From My Little Desktop Photos

How to add a little Zen to your life, and why sed is my new favourite command

I've wanted to add quotes to my Conky for a while, and after coming across some discussions on Ubuntu Forums, I had a bit of a brain-child...There had to be a simple way (e.g. without an external script) to grab part of a website and parse it to display on my screen. I did a little research, and it turns out that a combination of curl and sed was what I needed. With a little help from my friends, I ended up with the following command (after TEXT in my Conky):

${alignr}${execpi 3600 curl --silent 'http://tinybuddha.com' | sed '{:q;N;s/\n/ /g;t q}'|grep -o '

[^<]*'|sed 's/

[[:blank:]]*//;s/[[:blank:]]*$//'|fold -sw 32 | sed -e 's/^/\${alignr}/' -e 's/ $//g'}

Basically, it uses curl to look at Tiny Buddha, an inspirational website featuring daily quotes. Then, for an explanation of all the sed commands, thanks to mobilediesel:

The first sed changes all newlines into spaces so the div tag will be on one line. Then grep looks for the div class="entry" up to the first < character. Then sed again to take out the div tag along with the spaces following it, then the spaces at the end. Then, obviously, through fold so it fits nicely on the desktop.

Since it's looking specifically for the div class="entry" tag, grep should find it even if the site layout changes.

The --silent suggestion is thanks to Crinos512.

Anyway, here's the result, a lovely minimal desktop, with just a battery bar (because I don't use any other indicators, not even a system tray these days!) and the time/date.

From Screenshots

It's a good day when...

...you make a top 15 list not once, but twice! Thanks jun auza :)

...Mostly to show off :)

Well, there's not really anything innovative in my latest Conky; I was just trying to get something that was easily adaptable to all wallpapers. There are two versions:

From Screenshots

From Screenshots

...a light version and a dark version.

Both make use of the following:

• Santana font
• Sax Mono font
• Token icons (slightly modified in the "light" version)
  
• Grassy grass wallpaper (sorry, no attribution)
• Hd Multi Colored Lines wallpaper

Troubleshooting own_window_type panel...One thing to watch out for!

For those of you who haven't seen my post over at the Conky Blog, my latest creation is a panel-like Conky to sit at the top of my screen and show my processes, date/time and battery state:

From Screenshots

From Screenshots

As I alluded to in the post, however, you need to make sure that if your panel text is all on one line, your code must ALSO be all on one line, or it will make your Conky too fat!

For example, the code that produced the panel in the screenie is:

TEXT
${goto 5}${voffset 3}CPU ${cpu}%${goto 60}${voffset -1}${font saxMono:size=8}[${top name 1} (${top cpu 1})] [${top name 2} (${top cpu 2})] [${top name 3} (${top cpu 3})]${font}${goto 425}${voffset -1}MEM ${memperc}%${goto 485}${voffset -1}${font saxMono:size=8}[${top_mem name 1} (${top_mem mem 1})] [${top_mem name 2} (${top_mem mem 2})] [${top_mem name 3} (${top_mem mem 3})]${font}${voffset -2}${font Sawasdee Bold:size=10}${alignr 5}${time %a, %d %b %Y %H.%M}${image ~/Pictures/bk_semi_trans_sq.png -s 1024x18 -p 0,0}${if_match ${battery_percent BAT1} <= 14}${image ~/Pictures/Batteries/battery_1.png -s 16x16 -p 845,1}${else}${if_match ${battery_percent BAT1} <= 27}${image ~/Pictures/Batteries/battery_2.png -s 16x16 -p 845,1}${else}${if_match ${battery_percent BAT1} <= 41}${image ~/Pictures/Batteries/battery_3.png -s 16x16 -p 845,1}${else}${if_match ${battery_percent BAT1} <= 54}${image ~/Pictures/Batteries/battery_4.png -s 16x16 -p 845,1}${else}${if_match ${battery_percent BAT1} <= 68}${image ~/Pictures/Batteries/battery_5.png -s 16x16 -p 845,1}${else}${if_match ${battery_percent BAT1} <= 82}${image ~/Pictures/Batteries/battery_6.png -s 16x16 -p 845,1}${else}${if_match ${battery_percent BAT1} < 95}${image ~/Pictures/Batteries/battery_7.png -s 16x16 -p 845,1}${else}${image ~/Pictures/Batteries/battery_full.png -s 16x16 -p 845,1}${endif}${endif}${endif}${endif}${endif}${endif}${endif}

...uh, kind of a mess. HOWEVER, if you try to clean it up by putting line breaks in between the text and each of the two $image calls, a la:

TEXT
${goto 5}${voffset 3}CPU ${cpu}%${goto 60}${voffset -1}${font saxMono:size=8}[${top name 1} (${top cpu 1})] [${top name 2} (${top cpu 2})] [${top name 3} (${top cpu 3})]${font}${goto 425}${voffset -1}MEM ${memperc}%${goto 485}${voffset -1}${font saxMono:size=8}[${top_mem name 1} (${top_mem mem 1})] [${top_mem name 2} (${top_mem mem 2})] [${top_mem name 3} (${top_mem mem 3})]${font}${voffset -2}${font Sawasdee Bold:size=10}${alignr 5}${time %a, %d %b %Y %H.%M}
${image ~/Pictures/bk_semi_trans_sq.png -s 1024x18 -p 0,0}
${if_match ${battery_percent BAT1} <= 14}${image ~/Pictures/Batteries/battery_1.png -s 16x16 -p 845,1}${else}${if_match ${battery_percent BAT1} <= 27}${image ~/Pictures/Batteries/battery_2.png -s 16x16 -p 845,1}${else}${if_match ${battery_percent BAT1} <= 41}${image ~/Pictures/Batteries/battery_3.png -s 16x16 -p 845,1}${else}${if_match ${battery_percent BAT1} <= 54}${image ~/Pictures/Batteries/battery_4.png -s 16x16 -p 845,1}${else}${if_match ${battery_percent BAT1} <= 68}${image ~/Pictures/Batteries/battery_5.png -s 16x16 -p 845,1}${else}${if_match ${battery_percent BAT1} <= 82}${image ~/Pictures/Batteries/battery_6.png -s 16x16 -p 845,1}${else}${if_match ${battery_percent BAT1} < 95}${image ~/Pictures/Batteries/battery_7.png -s 16x16 -p 845,1}${else}${image ~/Pictures/Batteries/battery_full.png -s 16x16 -p 845,1}${endif}${endif}${endif}${endif}${endif}${endif}${endif}

...Conky will think that your output should be three lines wide, and will size your window accordingly, and you won't be able to shrink it back to that one line. Believe me, I tried! (And nearly threw my netbook out the window out of frustration before I figured it out.) You will get something that looks like this:

From My Little Desktop Photos

So, in short, it's a little bit of a pain to have to code it all on one line (and more than a little confusing!), but it's definitely worth it.

Special thanks go out to *MrStylo for his battery icons and =mrcool256 for his wallpaper.

Can someone please teach me (instantly) how to program Lua/Cairo?!

Weeeeeellll. Another feature of Conky 1.7.2 that, it has to be said, makes it closer to TAKING OVER THE ENTIRE WORLD, is the built-in set of Cairo & imlib2 bindings for Lua. (Don't worry, I'm not entirely sure what that means either...) What it does is make things, like the following, possible:

From Screenshots

The pies in this little beauty were accomplished with a script by Conky's own main dev, Brenden, using Cairo in a Lua script. The .conkyrc, Brenden's original script, the modified version that got me the screenie above, along with the screenie to guide you, are all packaged together over on my gnome-look.org site.

I only WISH I had this kind of skill!!! (Hence begging for someone to teach me!) But alas, I have no patience, and my brain is already onto the next thing. I must admit, I depend on y'all, my loyal Conky fans, to come up with something brilliant instead...

Happy Conkying!

Conky is Growing!

I'm living proof that it does happen, kids! Because of the work I've done with Conky, I've been roped into the project to help those lovely chaps expand their web presence. We've just set up an Official Conky Blog, and the Official Conky Forums are on their way!

One of Conky's biggest strengths (besides being generally awesome, that is!) is its fantastic community of users, who keep pushing the boundaries of what you can do with this little program. Our aim is to bring everyone together and create a cross-platform community of support and inspiration! So if you are Conkily-inclined, do head on over. I'll keep you posted.

In the meantime, check out these awesome active threads for cutting-edge Conky technology:

• The Conky screenshot thread at ubuntuforums.org.
• The Conky help thread at the Crunchbang Forums.
• A similar thread on the Fedora Forums.
• ...at the Mint Forums.

...You get the picture. I found a forum thread for pretty much every distro I could think of (although I've only included the most recently active ones here).

Finally, one of the most exciting Conky websites out there:

• CONKY HARDCORE!

If the name wasn't enough to tempt you, then its extensive library of Conky tips and tricks surely will.

One small problem with Conky 1.7.2, through no fault of its own

So Conky 1.7.2 was released on Monday...Among the new features is $desktop (and a couple similar functions), which I was excited about particularly because I thought that if you combined it with the $if_match variable, you might be able to create a different Conky on each workspace!

So I dove straight in and started testing the $desktop variable with

Desktop ${desktop}/${desktop_number}

which should output "Desktop 1/4", etc. Uh, except that it didn't. It only gave me "Desktop 1/1". On every desktop.

First thing I did was treble-check the syntax, since I'm notorious for screwing it up (!), but it was right...So what was the problem? I decided to test and see if ${desktop_name} worked, but realised that my desktops didn't have names, and I didn't actually know how to name them!

A quick Google search later, I came up with this bug over at Launchpad. It's an old one, but I still seem to be getting the same problem: whilst running Compiz, all of my desktops are "Desk 1", despite the fact that hovering over the desktop switcher on the panel shows them all having different names. If I turn off desktop effects, no problemo, and the Conky ${desktop} variables work fine.

I guess I'll just have to do without for now, as I care for my eye-candy more than knowing my desktop name!

If any of you clever clogs out there aren't using Compiz and want to have a go with the "different Conky for each desktop" idea, do let me know how you get on!!!

EDIT: As it turns out, the root of the problem with desktop names actually has to do with how Compiz controls your desktops. Compiz actually uses "virtual desktops", all drawn on the same "actual desktop"...The default Compiz settings (if you use desktop cube) are

Horizontal Virtual Size 4
Vertical Virtual Size 1
Number of Desktops 1

It would appear that Conky only sees that "one" desktop rather than the four virtual ones. It's unclear at this point whether adjusting some of these values will allow you to use the $desktop variable and still have your lovely spinning cube...

More playing...And how to change upper- to lower-case

One of the other things I've wanted to play with for a while is sideways text...Just to broaden the look of Conky that much more!

With the help of Johnny B, I used BlockyCounterClockwise to get the following:

From Screenshots

One of the challenges of this was that this particular font reverses the rotation of letters if you type in captials, so when you run the ${execi 60 date} command, the capitals in the output look upside down! I tried setting the "uupercase yes" config variable, but that just made all the text be the opposite rotation from the numbers!

So I had to figure out how to take any single capitals in the date output and change them to lowercase...After a quick Google search, I found:

sed y/ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ/abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

Not the prettiest method, but it works! To use it, simply pipe the date output into it, like so:

${execi 60 date | cut -c5 | sed y/ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ/abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz}

(The cut -c5 here just grabs the first letter of the month name.)

Now all we need are some more interesting sideways fonts :) (No offense of course, to Johnny B.)

Playing with Individual Character Placement

Thanks to the guys over at ubuntuforums.org, I found out that I can pipe the output from the 'date' command into cut in order to get control over individual characters in the date or time. It gives you that much more flexibility if you want to do some fancy-schmancy integration into your desktop.

A word of warning, however: it is a SERIOUS pain to code, very manual, and you must use a monospace font or else the spacing between letters won't look right. Anyway, an example first, and then the code for it:

From Screenshots

${voffset 190}${font saxMono:size=150}${execi 60 date +%a | cut -c1}${font}
${voffset -120}${goto 110}${font saxMono:size=110}${execi 60 date +%a | cut -c2}${font}
${voffset -122}${goto 190}${font saxMono:size=105}${execi 60 date +%a | cut -c3}${font}
${voffset -115}${goto 268}${font saxMono:size=98}${font}
${voffset -113}${goto 340}${font saxMono:size=92}${execi 60 date +%d | cut -c1}${font}
${voffset -110}${goto 408}${font saxMono:size=88}${execi 60 date +%d | cut -c2}${font}
${voffset -108}${goto 472}${font saxMono:size=82}${font}
${voffset -105}${goto 535}${font saxMono:size=76}${execi 60 date +%b | cut -c1}${font}
${voffset -98}${goto 595}${font saxMono:size=70}${execi 60 date +%b | cut -c2}${font}
${voffset -90}${goto 650}${font saxMono:size=62}${execi 60 date +%b | cut -c3}${font}
${voffset -85}${goto 700}${font saxMono:size=52}${font}
${voffset -88}${goto 740}${font saxMono:size=62}${execi 60 date +%Y | cut -c1}${font}
${voffset -88}${goto 785}${font saxMono:size=65}${execi 60 date +%Y | cut -c2}${font}
${voffset -90}${goto 835}${font saxMono:size=68}${execi 60 date +%Y | cut -c3}${font}
${voffset -94}${goto 885}${font saxMono:size=75}${execi 60 date +%Y | cut -c4}${font}
${voffset 25}${goto 720}${font saxMono:size=85}${execi 60 date +%R | cut -c1}${font}
${voffset -105}${goto 785}${font saxMono:size=92}${execi 60 date +%R | cut -c2}${font}
${voffset -120}${goto 850}${font saxMono:size=110}${execi 60 date +%R | cut -c4}${font}
${voffset -125}${goto 920}${font saxMono:size=125}${execi 60 date +%R | cut -c5}${font}

How to make Conky play nicely with KDE 4.3

Up till recently, I stuck fervently to Gnome DE, since it was the default on Ubuntu 8.10. After I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.04, I decided to give Kubuntu a whirl (the current version of Kubuntu is KDE 4.2), but I could barely get it to run for an hour without a total system freeze, so I ditched that idea!

When KDE 4.3 came out, I was willing to give it another try, especially as a number of folks on the August Screenie Thread at the Ubuntu Forums said that it was much faster and better all around than 4.2...Well, they didn't let me down! However, this is not an I LOVE KDE thread...

Since I depend heavily on Conky to keep my system running, I needed KDE and Conky to play nicely together or I wouldn't be able to use it full-time. Since I already used a startup script to run Conky, I just let that run in KDE and, uh, got this:

From My Little Desktop Photos

After a bit of investigation (thank you, Internet), I discovered that the reason was twofold: first, Conky uses pseudo-transparency instead of ACTUAL transparency; second, KDE doesn't draw wallpaper to the root window, only to the plasma desktop. To clarify these points:
1) Pseudo-transparency in Conky means that it peeks at the root desktop and draws it as the background of the Conky window.
2) KDE draws wallpapers to the plasma desktop only, which is the lowest window on top of the root window. Instead, the root window is empty, which shows up in Conky as black. Yuck. Well, unless you really like black.

Anyway, after much tinkering, I have gotten my desktop to look like this:

From My Little Desktop Photos

Yay!

To get your Conky and KDE to cooperate, rather than pugilate (is that a word?):

Use feh to draw the current background to the root window.

Feh is a lightweight image viewer, but that's really irrelevant, since it does what we need it to here! To install it (if you haven't already), use:

sudo apt-get install feh

I will assume for the moment that you are already using a startup script to launch your Conky from the startup programs menu...Mine initially looked like this:

#!/bin/bash
sleep 15
conky &

I wanted to run feh just once before Conky started up, so that the root window was already drawn before Conky tried to peek at it, so I modified my conky_start.sh to be:

#! /bin/bash
feh --bg-scale `grep 'wallpaper=' ~/.kde/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc | tail --bytes=+11`
sleep 15
conky -&

A couple of notes...The "--bg-scale" option assumes that you use "scale" to draw your wallpaper (as opposed to center, tile, etc.). If you do use another method, you can also use --bg-tile --bg-center, etc. instead. The feh looks at the plasma-desktop-appletsrc file to see what wallpaper is currently being used, and draws that to the background.

And as with all tweaks, there are a couple of pitfalls. First, because we're running feh just once before Conky starts, if you change backgrounds during your session, it won't change in Conky, a la this:

From My Little Desktop Photos

I would recommend doing a

killall conky
~/scripts/conky_start.sh

and restarting the plasma-desktop to redraw your Conky (I just log out and back in).

Another pitfall is that if you use the stock KDE wallpapers, this method may not work. That's because the "wallpaper=" field in plasma-desktop-appletsrc in this case points to a directory, not a file, and somehow KDE figures out which of several resolutions to use. Feh can't figure that out, so it draws nothing, and you're back to the black background. The workaround is to find the wallpaper you want, copy it into, say ~/Pictures/Wallpapers/ and select it from there with the Desktop Settings dialog.

Ensure that your Conky window doesn't overlap any plasmoids.

Regardless of whether you use own_window_hints below (see my previous post), plasmoids will always draw still lower. So if your Conky window overlaps, you'll get something like this:

From My Little Desktop Photos

(Keep in mind that I use Compiz to make my Conky semi-transparent, as in another previous post...)

Enjoy KDE!!!

Well, that's pretty self-explanatory...!

Who needs screenlets when you can have Conky?!

I've just finished working on my latest Conky!

From Screenshots

There are two main features...
1) Use a combination of Conky and Compiz to get nifty transparency effects

I have my windows set to 95% transparency in Compiz, which never applied to Conky until recently when I started using the "own_window yes" option (see a couple posts previous). Then it occurred to me that I could use it to create a nifty effect! Here's I did to get the top text transparent whilst keeping the bottom text opaque:

+ Run two Conkys. You might not notice, but the top and bottom of this screenie are actually running two different Conkys simultaneously.
+ Specify the class of the Conky that will be semi-transparent, by using something like "own_window_class Conky-semi" (I used Conky-50 because I'd intended to use 50%, but 75% looks better!).
+ In Compiz Config Settings Manager, go to Opacity, Brightness & Saturation and add a new window type, "class=Conky-semi" and set the transparency to something like 75%:

From My Little Desktop Photos

+ Et voila!

2) Create a battery widget

There are a number of great sets of images you can download as icons for various dock programs; you can use one of these suites, combined with Conky's ${image} function and a big nested ${if_match ${battery_percent}} statement to create a battery widget, like so:

${if_match ${battery_percent BAT1} <= 14}${image /home/alison/Pictures/Batteries/battery_1.png -s 75x100 -p 0,20}${else}${if_match ${battery_percent BAT1} <= 27}${image /home/alison/Pictures/Batteries/battery_2.png -s 75x100 -p 0,20}${else}${if_match ${battery_percent BAT1} <= 41}${image /home/alison/Pictures/Batteries/battery_3.png -s 75x100 -p 0,20}${else}${if_match ${battery_percent BAT1} <= 54}${image /home/alison/Pictures/Batteries/battery_4.png -s 75x100 -p 0,20}${else}${if_match ${battery_percent BAT1} <= 68}${image /home/alison/Pictures/Batteries/battery_5.png -s 75x100 -p 0,20}${else}${if_match ${battery_percent BAT1} <= 82}${image /home/alison/Pictures/Batteries/battery_6.png -s 75x100 -p 0,20}${else}${if_match ${battery_percent BAT1} < 95}${image /home/alison/Pictures/Batteries/battery_7.png -s 75x100 -p 0,20}${else}${image /home/alison/Pictures/Batteries/battery_full.png -s 75x100 -p 0,20}${endif}${endif}${endif}${endif}${endif}${endif}${endif}

Not too pretty, I'll grant you, but it does the trick! Just make sure you've got all the ${endif}s you need :)

And yes, before you ask, I will package this one, and the battery widget separately, once I have permission from the artist to do so. The battery widget icons are by *MrStylo; please click on his DeviantArt account for more info.
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One final little nugget: a really nifty, pretty lightweight way to get a nice semi-transparent background for your Conky is to make a small semi-transparent square (I used a 50x50px square I made in GIMP), and stretch it to the size you need using the -s option in the ${image} variable.

Happy Conkying!