So I learned about Conky a few months ago. After being tired of the Ubuntu Unity BS, I switched to Linux Mint. I still like having some pretty stuff floating around my desktop but I was tired of the fancy Unity implementation that was more of a pain for me. There is only so much effort I am willing to put into my system to fix code that is frustrating. When I switched to LM15, I was infinitely happier that I had a nice and stable system that would allow me to explore both itself and other endeavours without having to fix something that broke every week. So now I have a stable system that I can tweak the cool stuff to display useful information. Eventualy I'll ditch the task bar all together. Most people just take screenshots of their desktop and be done with it. While that's nice, it limits the experience for my desktop as things are not static. So here is a video of things working on my desktop.

You'll notice the subtle glowing/pulsing of some of the lazers ;)

Step 1: The Breakdown of Areas.

Here is the breakdown of each area. Now here is where it gets messy. See, placing things on the Desktop takes a heck of a lot of fiddling. When I added a new section, it was in it's own configuration file. So I have 14 .conkeyrc files. Eventually I'll consolidate them but for now, this works and I notice no system lagging (6CPUS & 8GB Ram, I had better not!).

I could post each and every configuration file here but that would be a waste of screen space. So I put them all in a DropBox folder and you can just download them all/individually.

Main Folder: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/gll4pgdm4ctel5n/yyaKoHFf30

To try and list each part would be painful. I grabbed so many different bits of code from so many places. Here are some noteable sources.

Animated images: http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=9442 This was an interseting way to get an animated gif to show on the desktop. Worked awesome but takes some prep to make it work.

Displaying Music: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1262380(reply #3 here was what I used) You will need to make sure you have qdbus working in order to grab the info needed. qdbus allows you to control vlc(and others) from the command line, thus you can grab song info from a query to qdbus as well.

I have more mods to add and will create a part 2 'ible in another few months when there is significant change. This setup took me 5 months to get to working on it every other week or so. I can't stress enough how helpful the guys on the #conky IRC channel are! Get on and ask questions but please make sure you Google stuff first. They generally won't hand-hold you through things.

If you want to get a hold of me, you can find me on my own freenode IRC Channel, #dragondon.

Happy modding!

Step 2: Too Many Configs

For those who may have done this type of thing before, I am open to suggestions how you managed your setup. I'm hoping to reduce all these config files down to one if possible :)