Conky developers have added a bunch of cool new features in recent versions (direct managing of nvidia GPU data/clock/temp, audacious media player support, entropy indicator, ecc.), however the version shipped with Ubuntu is dated august 2008. Do you dare compiling it by yourself?

Compiling conky is pretty easy, enabling some advanced features a little less:

1. download the development sources from this Sourceforge page
2. unzip the archive either graphically or via the terminal with: tar xjf conkyXXNN.tar.bz2 or tar xzf conkyXXNN.tar.gz
3. enter the conky directory using the terminal and choose which advanced features to enable from the menu ./configure –help
4. the most interesting ones are actually the native support for nvidia drivers and for wireless. Compiling from source however requires some additional libreries to be installed, for instance sudo apt-get install liblua5.1-0-dev libiw-dev
5. run ./configure –enable-nvidia –enable-wlan
   
6. if you get the following error you forgot to install wireless-tools sources (libiw-dev package, on RedHat is called wireless-tools-dev)

   checking for iwlib.h... no

   configure: error: iwlib.h header not found

7. make
8. make install

That’s it!

You may then customize your .conkyrc in your home folder as you wish!

As a start you can check the sample file in data/conky.conf but do not hesitate to try inspiration by having a look on http://www.gnome-look.org searching with the keyword ‘conky’ for other great scripts!

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