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Friday, May 04, 2012

Setting up Conky & Lua-Widgets

Installing Conky-Lua widget/theme on Ubuntu

1) Install conky and conky-all from Ubuntu Software Center or via apt-get on terminal.

2) Unzip the contents of the tar.gz or zip of Conky/Lua theme submitted by the developer into some folder named Scripts.

Most importantly, the unzipped file will have a conky text file and a .lua file in it.

3) Ensure Nautilus Browser -> View -> Show hidden files option is enabled and create a hidden folder in your /home/Your_Username directory with the name .conky

4) Within the Scripts folder, search for file with .lua extension. This file contains the widget script. Copy the .lua file into the .conky folder.

5) Rename the left over text file in the Scripts folder to a hidden file named .conkyrc and place it in /home/Your_Username directory.


6) Open the .conkyrc file in gedit and edit the portion of the .conkyrc file which refers to the  widget location path i.e the .lua script path. In this case should point to

/home/Your_Username/.conky/someWidgetScript.lua

On terminal run command

conky

which will start the Conky theme/widget.


Installing Multiple Conky-Lua widget/themes on Ubuntu

By default, Running the conky command will invoke the .conkyrc text file at /home/Your_Username location and checks for lua scripts placed in the .conky folder.

In case of setting up multiple widgets you need to have multiple conky text files and multiple lua scripts.

Place all the .lua files in the .conky folder in the /home/Your_Username directory.

Let the text files remain in the Scripts folder but ensure that the configuration path in them points to their corresponding .lua scripts in the .conky folder. (as shown in step 6 above)

In terminal, run

conky -c /home/Your_Username/Scripts/ConkyTextFileScript1
conky -c /home/Your_Username/Scripts/ConkyTextFileScript2
conky -c /home/Your_Username/Scripts/ConkyTextFileScript3

Each of these will take the conky text file path with -c option and individually start the widgets.


PS: You might face issues if any of the above actions, like the path configuration (in step 6) is not done correctly. Also, This requires little bit of scripting knowledge to work your way around. In a nutshell, these are the minimal steps required to setup Conky-Lua Widgets on Ubuntu.




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