Compiling a new, cooler conky

NOTICE: This is not the most updated version of the guide. Please see the blog post called “Compiling conky from git on ubuntu 9.10” for the actual details!

From the conky website:

Conky is a free, light-weight system monitor for X, that displays any information on your desktop. Conky is licensed under the GPL and runs on Linux and BSD.

Conky is a pretty cool tool, but the version packaged for Ubuntu is rather restricted.

Building conky, and enabling all your favorite extensions is easy, and I will show you how to do it in Xubuntu 9.10.

First, you should install some git and get the sources for conky:
sudo aptitude install git-core
cd ~
git clone git://git.omp.am/conky.git
cd conky
./autogen.sh

Now you have to select which extensions you want to compile into conky. You have these options:
--enable-audacious --enable-eve --enable-iostats --enable-profiling --enable-weather-metar
--enable-bmpx --enable-fast-install --enable-lua --enable-rss --enable-weather-xoap
--enable-curl --enable-testing --enable-lua-cairo --enable-shared --enable-wlan
--enable-debug --enable-ibm --enable-lua-imlib2 --enable-static --enable-xmms2
--enable-dependency-tracking --enable-imlib2 --enable-nvidia


I have to admit that some of these switches do stuff that I know NOTHING about – so enable these at your own risk!

Now, to configure:

./configure --enable-iostats --enable-rss --enable-weather-metar --enable-curl --enable-nvidia
IF you try to make conky support something you don’t have the proper libraries installed for, you will be told here. Install the package in question and run ./configure with the flags you choose earlier. Repeat until ./configure stops complaining.
When that is done, all you have to do is to build the program:
make -j 4 && make install

Now you should be ready to make some really cool bling!

Related posts:

• Compiling conky from git in ubuntu 9.10
• Setting up CUDA development in Ubuntu 9.04
• Compiling wireshark from source on Ubuntu 9.10
• Securing configure.php for oscommerce on one.com
• Improving randomness and entropy in ubuntu 9.10

Tags: conky, coolness, development, howto, linux