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

(UPDATE on November 26, 2011: the weather.com site has changed and  I have updated my scripts so that they still work)

Conky is a free, light-weight system monitor for X, that displays any information on your desktop. Yesterday, after a question I got in an Ubuntu forum, I decided to install it in my Ubuntu 10.10 desktop and laptop computer. It was not easy and I had to go to different forums posts and links, so I decided to write this post on what I did.

My conky setup involves two different sections and occupies quite a bit of the desktop. In the the two monitor setup of my desktop this is not a problem, but in the laptop it has the problem that Conky, despite sitting always below any windows, sits over desktop iconcs, so any icon that you have in the desktop area where conky sits will be hidden by it. I don't use desktop icons too much and the icons can still be accessed by hovering over the conky window with the mouse, but be aware of this if you want to install it.

In my desktop computer I'm using two monitors and I have configured Conky to show in the upper right corner, and it shows in the second screen. In the laptop it's also defined to show up in the upper right corner. I also installed conkyForecast which is a python script to access weather information for conky fed from www.weather.com, an online weather service.

This is how nice it looks in the laptop, with the "comet" background that can be found in /usr/share/backgrounds/cosmos/comet.jpg:

The first thing to do is to install conky itself:

sudo apt-get install conky

We will wait to configure conky until we have installed everything for the weather forecast.