Conky is a program that shows information at the computer desktop, like weather or system information. With version 1.11.6, which is the version that comes with Ubuntu 20.10, the configuration script has changed its format to lua. This makes all conky with the old configuration unusable.

The change in format is good, because the syntax of the  old format was quite inconsistent. The new format is more structured and clear. For instance these were the first lines of my configuration with the old format:

gap_x -620

gap_y -300

minimum_size 268 680

maximum_width 268

own_window yes

own_window_transparent yes

own_window_hints undecorated,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager,below

border_inner_margin 0

border_outer_margin 0

Now the format looks as follows:

conky.config = {

  gap_x = -1920,

 gap_y = -300,

 minimum_width = 268,

minimum_height = 680,

 

  own_window = true,

own_window_transparent = true,

own_window_hints = 'undecorated,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager,below',

border_inner_margin = 0,

border_outer_margin = 0

};

To change to the new format, fortunately no manual configuration has to be done. There is small program that does the work. First we need to install a couple of things. It is good to make sure that both conky and conky-all are installed:

sudo apt install conky conky-all

In my case, the conversion program was not executable, so I had to first make it executable:

sudo chmod a+x /usr/share/doc/conky-all/convert.lua

Two other programs are needed:

sudo apt install lua5.4 dos2unix

Once all the previous is installed, we can proceed to convert to the new format, and we can keep a copy of the old one just in case:

cp .conkyrc .conkyrc.bak

Now we can perform the conversion:

/usr/share/doc/conky-all/convert.lua .conkyrc.bak .conkyrc

In my case nothing else was needed. After these steps my conky started working exactly as before.