“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.” – from the conky website.
I had to upgrade my old post on how to compile conky, since conky’s development team deprecated autogen and switched to cmake.
I will just show you very quickly how to compile conky. First start an terminal, and copy this in, one line at a time:
sudo aptitude install git-core cmake
cd ~
git clone git://git.omp.am/conky.git
cd conky
mkdir build
cmake ../build
This will build conky with the standard set of features. To change the set of features conky will have, you need to install yet another tool[1]:
sudo aptitude install cmake-curses-gui
cd ~/conky/build
ccmake ../
This is what it should look like:
Now you configure conky to fit your needs. You move the cursor up and down on the arrow keys, and changes options with the enter key. When you’re done, you press the ‘c’ key to write the configuration. If somethings fails, for instance if you don’t have the required development libraries, you will be informed. Press ‘q’ to exit the configuration utility.
If some development libraries were needed to compile conky, install them and run cmake again, for example:
apt-get libcurl4-dev
cmake ../
If everything worked, type make; sudo make install
1: I am NOT experienced with cmake! If you can adjust build options on the commandline, please inform me. 
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