Working with Conky

2015-08-16

My Thinkpad X201 was resurrected from the dead (TODO: I should write an article about this). As part of this operation, I had to replace the thermal coupling gel between the CPU, GPU, and the heat sink. Once done, the laptop needs to go through about 200 thermal cycles (or so the internet tells me) before the coupling reaches maximum efficancy. It's also posisble to add too much or too little or to just generally do a less than stellar job.

Regardless, the laptop can overheat when I have all four cores running for a while. And, when that happens, it shuts down with little warning dropping the contents of my RAM drive (TODO).

Fortunately, we have Conky.

Conky helps you monitor the physical state of your computer.

Install it with:

sudo apt-get install conky

Create a default config file from the template:

cp /etc/conky/conky.conf ~/.conkyrc

Start Conky:

conky &

If you change the config, you can have Conky read the update config file with:

killall -SIGUSR1 conky

My Conky file follows. Note that I have several temperature read outs included - this helps me pause processes before they become dangerous to the system.

alignment top_right
background no
border_width 1
cpu_avg_samples 2
default_color white
default_outline_color white
default_shade_color white
draw_borders no
draw_graph_borders yes
draw_outline no
draw_shades no
use_xft yes
xftfont DejaVu Sans Mono:size=12
gap_x 5
gap_y 0
minimum_size 5 5
net_avg_samples 2
no_buffers yes
out_to_console no
out_to_stderr no
extra_newline no
own_window yes
own_window_class Conky
own_window_type desktop
stippled_borders 0
update_interval 1.0
uppercase no
use_spacer none
show_graph_scale no
show_graph_range no
double_buffer yes

TEXT
#${scroll 16 $nodename - $sysname $kernel on $machine | }
#$hr
${color grey}Uptime:$color $uptime
${color grey}Frequency (in MHz):$color $freq
#${color grey}Frequency (in GHz):$color $freq_g
${color grey}RAM Usage:$color $mem/$memmax - $memperc% ${membar 4}
${color grey}Swap Usage:$color $swap/$swapmax - $swapperc% ${swapbar 4}
${color grey}CPU Usage:$color $cpu% ${cpubar 4}
${color grey}Processes:$color $processes  ${color grey}Running:$color $running_processes
$hr
Temp:   ${acpitemp}°C
Fan:    ${exec sensors | grep 'fan1' | sed -E 's/\s+/ /g' | cut -d ' ' -f 2} RPM
Core 0: ${exec sensors | grep 'Core 0' | cut -c15-19}°C
Core 2: ${exec sensors | grep 'Core 2' | cut -c15-19}°C
$hr
#${color grey}File systems:
# / $color${fs_used /}/${fs_size /} ${fs_bar 6 /}
#${color grey}Networking:
#Up:$color ${upspeed eth0} ${color grey} - Down:$color ${downspeed eth0}
#$hr
${color grey}Name              PID   CPU%   MEM%
${color lightgrey} ${top name 1} ${top pid 1} ${top cpu 1} ${top mem 1}
${color lightgrey} ${top name 2} ${top pid 2} ${top cpu 2} ${top mem 2}
${color lightgrey} ${top name 3} ${top pid 3} ${top cpu 3} ${top mem 3}
${color lightgrey} ${top name 4} ${top pid 4} ${top cpu 4} ${top mem 4}

Richbits