Conky Colors Gets A New "Board Mode"

Conky is a light-weight system monitor that displays the info on your desktop - you've seen it in many screenshots so I'm sure most of you already know what Conky is. Conky Colors is a tool that make is very easy to set up and configure Conky.

A new Conky Colors version has been released (5.0 beta 1) today which adds a beautiful new "board mode" which you can see in the screenshot in the beginning of the post. Here's another screenshot using a light (Radiance) Conky Colors theme:

How to use Conky Colors Board Mode

To use the new Conky Colors board mode, firstly you'll have to set up Conky and Conky Colors as explained in THIS post.

To set up the "board" mode, use "--board" when configuring Conky Colors. Here are all the options available for the board mode:

--w= - Set your screen width
--h= - Set your screen height
--theme=<theme> - Set default theme color (Doesn't work with skiki-colors/shikidust/dust themes)
--dark - Set Dark Brightness (Doesn't work with ambiance/radiance/elementary themes)
--alldark - Set Dark Brightness for all (Doesn't work with any theme)
--alllight - Set light Brightness for all (Doesn't work with any theme)
--cpu=<number> - Set number of cpu cores [max=2]
--unit=<C|F> - Force output temperature either in Celius or Fahrenheit

Here is the exact command that I've used to create the Conky Colors configuration that you can see in the first screenshot in this post:

./conky-colors --board --w=1920 --h=1080 --cpu=2 --dark

Unfortunately there are two drawbacks to this new board mode: it supports a maximum of 2 CPUs - hopefully it will get support for more CPUs in the future (as this is still in beta); there's not much you can customize about it, unlike the default Conky Colors mode which has a huge list of options so if you want more info on your desktop, use that instead.

Download Conky Colors

3 Beautiful Conky Configurations

1. Conky Meet Faenza

2. Conky Launchpad

3. Conky Ken

The first 2 Conky setups above are very easy to configure - just install conky, then copy the extracted files (look for hidden files and folders too) into your folder and that's it. Conky Ken takes a bit longer to set up but it's not all that difficult, however I couldn't get the weather to work (it might have something to do with might location though). For each of the 3 Conky setups above, download the archive and see the README for exact installation instructions.

And speaking of Conky - Conky Colors, an utility to easily set up amazing custom Conky configuration has just been updated (by the way, I was using Conky Colors in the Compiz 0.9.2 screenshot). Download the latest Conky Colors | How to set up Conky Colors Cairo mode (rings).