Great tutorial. It really puzzles me why Ubuntu comes standard with a fugly interface when something as clean and elegant as this is achievable.. This is where linux falls down if you ask me. Very ugly, boring UIs (and that my friends, is what the masses want!)

Step 10 .

What do we need to do with location ID. do we need to paste it into the file which is named weather ?. I tried this, but the weather file created gets overwritten by conky each time it is started

@vgh and @bert. The post is updated to cover your questions. Please go through the tutorial once more. Sorry for the inconvenience and confusion.

I cannot get 2 things to work.
1. The Temperature displays in Celsius but i still have LETTER “F” while it should be “C”.
2. Gmail checker is not working.

Help Please. thanks

Amazing post. I loved openlogo things with conky

[...] Смотрим, читаем: Gmail+Weather+Beauty right on your Ubuntu desktop [...]

I’m fairly new to Ubuntu, and I’m having some trouble getting conky working as it’s supposed to. I’ve gone through all of the steps and I’m fairly sure that I’ve done everything properly (of course, if it isn’t working, something’s up).

Whenever I try to run conky, instead of it opening up on the desktop as beautifully as yours appears, it opens in this ugly little window with tiny white text on a black background. It displays information like uptime, CPU usage, etc.

I’m wondering if anyone knows what issue I’m experiencing here, and how I might go about fixing it.

This was a very helpful post, thanks. Two notes:
On my system I had to add:
“sudo apt-get install python-feedparser” since this module was missing.
Also, for those wanting Celsius, it is nice to also grep for ‘F’ in the pogodynka.sh script and change these to C.

scratch that, it works now (thanx Neil) one more question though, is there a way to change the colors? some of it clashes with my background…

i have the same problem as sponty

conky comes up in a black ugly window, not on the desktop

Same as sponty too… black box only
any ideas?

I got the battery bar working already by changing to BAT1 in .conkyc

Thanks all

[...] – Beautiful Conky Setup [...]

[...] Optimize your Ubuntu desktop Filed under: Linux — 0ddn1x @ 2008-09-30 16:52:13 +0000 http://www.quicktweaks.com/2008/09/27/gmail-weather-beauty-right-on-your-ubuntu-desktop/ [...]

This conky thing is beautiful….however, i’m having issues. I am getting these errors:

cat: /home/rishijain/weather: Is a directory
/home/rishijain/scripts/pogodynka.sh: 50: cannot create /home/rishijain/weather: Is a directory
head: error reading `/home/rishijain/weather’: Is a directory
tail: error reading `/home/rishijain/weather’: Is a directory
head: error reading `/home/rishijain/weather’: Is a directory
head: error reading `/home/rishijain/weather’: Is a directory
head: error reading `/home/rishijain/weather’: Is a directory
head: error reading `/home/rishijain/weather’: Is a directory
head: error reading `/home/rishijain/weather’: Is a directory
head: error reading `/home/rishijain/weather’: Is a directory
localhost [127.0.0.1] 7634 (?) : Connection refused

the weather thing isn’t working, and the connection refused thing keeps coming. Any ideas?

@Dave: Which bar are you talking about? If you are talking about the Battery/CPU bars, then they are not transparent. I’ve given the colors so that they blend with the background and they look if they are transparent

@Naio: After you are done with dual setting don’t forget to share how you did it along with the screenshot of your desktop. You can send me an email at admin[at]quicktweaks[dot]com

@Neil: Thanx for bringing that to my notice. I will update the post to include this.

@Onno: Thanx for bringing that to my notice. I will update the post to include this.

where is the pogodynka.sh script??

I had this issue when I first started. The instructions tell you to put everything in your home directory. Well, really, it needs to go in home/username in order work. Once I moved the .conkyrc file and the additional folders into ../home/Grizz everything worked as advertised.

Hello,

I seem to have a problem with starting conky automatically, if I add conky under sessions it loads up with a kind of black frame around it and it stays on top of every window.

It only works good if I start it up manually (Alt F2, Conky).

Any advice?

Thanks

DaC

Run in the ALT-F2 box:

conky -c ~/conkyrc

Ablosutly awsome desktop!! I really, really love it, and i’m really picky about desktops, i’ll try it later! It rocks! Thanks for sharing.

@Jeff: We like to see what you have got, for sure. If you want to share anything with us, you are most welcome. You can shoot an email to admin[at]quicktweaks[dot]com. If it deserves to be shared with others, I will certainly post it under your name.
Thanks

@CyberCowboy: the idea of getting mails from GMail is very simple – GMail allows to read mail as feed. Any other mail provider which facilitates reading mails as feed should fit well with conky. I don’t have any other accounts other than GMail but I will try to figure it out. In the meantime, if you figured out anything, don’t forget to share with us.

Looks good? Yes. Useful and easy to use? Nope.

That’s a good point about Ubuntu supporting old hardware, but at the same time support should be there for new PC. Legacy support is one of the reasons Windows Vista is the way it is.

If people want to keep there old PC’s they should be satisfied:) with old software

Hey There

All is working perfectly loving the look. I’m wondering how to get my conky to update, my time and weather etc all stay the same, is there any way I can accomplish this?

Thanks Bud

@Dave:
Read my previous post Three Little Things To Make Your Ubuntu Desktop Beautiful and Productive on how to make Mac style menu bar (BTW it’s called dock bar).

@Rick: It seems that you haven’t copied all the required fonts. Make sure you have downloaded all the fonts and have copied it inside /your home director/fonts directory. Also, to change F/F to C/C, look for F/F in pogodynka.sh file and replace with C/C. Let me know if it worked.

Yep that did it, thanks.

for imap you can find here a rc file and imap script:

http://conky.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html

hello this should fix the problem with the startup of conky, it doesnt take over the section of the desktop

use_xft yes
xftfont verdana:size=8
alignment top_right
xftalpha 0.8
own_window yes
own_window_type override
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager
double_buffer yes
draw_shades no
draw_outline no
draw_borders no

can someone help me find the script folder? i found one but it doesnt have the pogodynka.sh file
stippled_borders 10
border_margin 4
border_width 1
default_shade_color grey
default_outline_color black
default_color BADCDD
use_spacer none
no_buffers yes
uppercase no
color1 F8DF58

[...] getting GMail and the weather on my desktop with Conky, I personally think I have something a bit better than the silly widget dashboard from OSX! You can [...]

Hey guys. I can’t seem to get my gmail or weather to work. I’ve started over twice now but still nothing. (Everything else works perfect).

Heres a pic
http://i301.photobucket.com/albums/nn74/Ebtoulson/Screenshot.png

Great tips here. I love conky but this has helped me go to another level and so simple. Well written, thank a lot for the post.

Ok, I found a solution to the black background thing for KDE3 users. Might work for Gnome users too, but I don’t know if it’s the same problem. Basically, conky sets its background using the root window, and KDE’s background is not on the root window. The easiest way to make the two match is using an app called feh. I found it in the Mandriva repos, I’m sure (k)Ubuntu’s repos will have it too. Install it and type “feh –bg-center `dcop kdesktop KBackgroundIface currentWallpaper 1`. If you use a background that’s not the same resolution as your desktop, you’ll need to use –bg-scale instead of –bg-center. KDE4 users will have to change the dcop part of the command to whatever the KDE4/D-Bus equivalent is (I’m not using KDE4 yet, so I’m not sure.) Gnome users would obviously have to find another way to get their background info in there. After this, conky should be transparent.

You can add this to your .conkyrc as an exec line to make it run automagically when conky starts, or run it with your autostart. I am still looking for a good way to get it to work with rotating desktops. The easy solution would be to use execi or texeci in my .conkyrc and have it run it every so often, but that seems like it would be more resource intensive than I would like. Ideally, it would run with the changeWallpaper command, so if anyone knows how to do that, I’m open to suggestions.

Found this solution at http://briancarper.net/2006/08/25/transparent-conky-in-kde-part-2/ . Hopefully someone finds it as helpful as I did.

sweeet!! thanks i was wondering how this could be achieved. thanks for posting.

i would love to know how to install eterminal and have it transparent and all. i am newbie…

almost forgot, how do you change from military time to standard?? i looked in the files but i didnt see how i could change it. thanks:)

[...] pictures come from Quick Tweaks’ detailed Conky how-to, which explains how to set up Gmail monitoring, Yahoo Weather updates, and statistics from your [...]

I seem to be having a problem with the line in the script that dumps the weather page.

As written, I get no output in the weather file. The only way I can get anything at all is to remove the grep and sed statements, which returns the entire page.

I have also tried w3m -dump http://weather.yahoo.com/forecast/“$kod”_c.html > $plik | grep -A21 “Current” | sed ’s/DEG/°/g’.
It still just outputs the full page but seems to grep and find “Current” correctly (highlighted in the file) and on my desktop, it shows the cloud icon then “C / .Sports C” so it is parsing the file and grabbing the bullet and the word Sports.

So confused…

Thanks,
craig

In pogodynka.sh replace

echo $temp F / $tempo F

with

echo $temp C / $tempo C

To get the battery going see
http://linuxinside.blogspot.com/2008/03/set-battery-in-conky-correctly.html

I am really enjoying this setup, thanks for all the work.

That being said, I’m having two problems that I can’t seem to find a solution for, so any help would be really appreciated

1. The icon for weather shows up as a vertical rectangle.

2. Most of the lines that should be blank show up with a vertical rectangle (which I assume is the new line character)

I’ll keep messing with it, but any suggestions would be great. Thanks!

hi i got conky working but its not transparent, i can see my background image. but if any icons/folders are behind it i cant see them

[...] pictures come from Quick Tweaks’ detailed Conky how-to, which explains how to set up Gmail monitoring, Yahoo Weather updates, and statistics from your [...]

Seems great. Sadly on my machine conky launched itself in a terminal and doesn’t read the config file. But I never succeeded in installing anything on Linux so it’s probably my fault.

ahh! dope, thanks bro, so “I” stands for standard i guess…thanks a bunch peace

I edited the .confyrc file to update the date at the bottom thus:

${font Radio Space:size=14}${time %A}
${font Radio Space:size=14}${time %d %B %Y}
${font Radio Space:size=55}${time %H:%M}

To Husam:
Right click on the Gnome-do icon in your notification area and choose preferences. Go to appearance and then theme. If you want it to look like in the picture choose glass frame.

I meant the gmail_parser.py file not the pogodynka.sh file

Now I got the gmail working by hardcoding the data into the gmail_parser.py file, but still no luck getting up/downspeed and upload/download working. They just still on 0…

Two minor thing… Why is there two CPU’s, and is the weathercast pretty bugger on your machines too? It seems to be only 1 time out of 3, that i shows the weather-’photo’.

Yeah – I have the same problem too!

@Chris: Yes, email ids with ‘.’ often cause problem. You can try putting \ in front of ‘.’ . I don’t have any email address which has . in it so can’t say for sure. As soon as I find some solution, I will let you know. If you figured out how to do it, please share the solution here.

I found, that if you wait about 10 seconds (depending on your machine, but that worked for me) it will start up all nicely… What I did was, I created a shell-script which I threw the following code in, and then I run that on startup.

#!/bin/bash
sleep 10 && conky;

In the conkyrc file, changing the own_window_type parameter from “override” to “normal” (without the quotes) seems to fix this for me. Hope this helps.

@Tenzin Monlam: Thank you so much for taking some time showing us how to do it. I’m glad that me and quicktweaks.com were able to help you make your desktop damn cool!

I did follow step 5. However, it did not work for me until I rebuilt my font cache by opening up the terminal and running:
sudo fc-cache -f -v

Man, I couldn’t get this working. I emailed the admin and they took a look at everything and walked me through what I was doing wrong.

Thanks a lot guys!

[...] Running Ubuntu 8.10, with transparent panels, souped-up wallpaper and conky. Conky script from here. Filed under: Tech Tips N Tricks, [...]

Thanks, got it working. Oddly, mediafire decided the fonts can be downloaded again.

Hi there,i really want to bring this great effects to my Ubuntu,but i can’t download the scripts and font files from mediafile,could you do me a favor to upload these files to dropbox and send me a share invitation to uptownboy@gmail.com?many many thanks.

I can’t get the gmail to work. I’ve checked the script loads of times and I only ever get @{expcpi} instead of the last 3 emails. Any idea what’s causing this?

When I installed it, there was a formatting problem when I pasted into the .conkyrc file. When I manually edited it instead of pasting into gedit, it worked fine with the instructions provided.

[...] Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex) Setting up Avant Window Navigator and GnomeDo Setting up Conky [...]

tank’s 4 the great post, conky it’s great, but i can’t get the wether stuff works fine it’s only show C/C no sun or cloud or any data, hope somebody can help me

in terminal i got this lines

Conky: desktop window (12000b4) is subwindow of root window (58)
Conky: window type – override
Conky: drawing to created window (2400001)
Conky: drawing to double buffer
sed: -e expression #1, char 1: unknown command: `
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/home/sergio/scripts/gmail_parser.py”, line 47, in
readmail(f, int(maxlen)) # Let the feed be chewed by feedparser
File “/home/sergio/scripts/gmail_parser.py”, line 39, in readmail
print ‘ ${color2}%s’ % atom.entries[i].title
UnicodeEncodeError: ‘ascii’ codec can’t encode character u’\xf3′ in position 20: ordinal not in range(128)

i figure the problem is whit the character ` but i don’t know where find it… tanks 4 advance and sorry 4 my spelling

Is there an easy way to start/stop conky? I find I start it, tweak my .conkyrc, then have to kill -9 the pid for conky, then repeat.

Erik

[...] Instlación bonita Conky [...]

Can we get a repost on the fonts file? I can’t get it working without that file.

Purghi

tanks now conky it’s complete working on my lap, only got a little issue, i don’t know why some times the size of the bars (Battery and CPU’s) change some times bigger or smaller, if you or anybody know how to fix it… any way tanks again.

I have exactly the same problem,

If you know of a solution please let me know @ riverazo@lycos.com

Thanks

elbeto

run conky in the terminal when you are testing the configs, then you can either open a new terminal tab and either :~$ pkill conky OR ctrl-c and that also kills it.

Thanks for this howto.

Conky is not displaying my gmail count or my weather. I updated pogodynka.sh and conkyrc as instructed and I have python-feedparser installed.

I’m running Ubuntu 8.10.

Any ideas?

If you are getting the black terminal make sure conkyrc is named .conkyrc

one annoying flaw with the weather is it does not show night time or a moon – when at night it still shows the sun

[...] Here is the tutorial – http://www.quicktweaks.com/2008/09/2…buntu-desktop/ [...]

Hi. i am using the mac4lin theme. i did all the above steps that you mentioned and then ran conky. All i got was a small black box displaying my system information and no changes to my theme.
What do i do ?

This is way cool, but how do I get Conky to run on the left side of my desktop? Also, I can’t get the weather to show up.

Happy New Year, all!

Hey – thank you so much for this. It’s awesome. I was able to fix all the bugs in my install, and it works great. I wanted to share a few things I discovered and responses to issues I’ve seen in the comments.

1- I’m a bit OCD, and I didn’t like having a “scripts” folder and a “weather” document hanging out in my home directory, so I played around and it is actually quite easy to make the necessary alterations to hide the files. Each time you use a javascript in your conkyrc file, the script is identified by a path – I use the gmail and weather scripts (weather is pogodynka and conditions, so it shows up twice). Then, pogodynka and conditions scripts both refer to the “weather” file you need to create. Just search for the one time “~/weather” is mentioned in each script. change all these by adding the “.” in the file path, then change the name of the scripts folder to “.scripts” and the weather document to “.weather” and you should be back up and running.
Example: “plik=~/.weather” is my new code line in pogodynka.

2- if you want the upspeed and downspeed to reflect your wired ethernet instead of wireless, you need to change the attribute in the upspeed and downspeed variables in conkyrc. For me, wireless is eth1 and wired is eth0. It’s really easy to find out which is which if you use the Wicd network manager – it lists the adapter names in preferences.

3- want more variables (and descriptions of variables already included in quicktweak’s awesome conkyrc file?) Find them here:
http://conky.sourceforge.net/variables.html

I’m pretty happy with my new Conky. I take no credit – my changes are very easy mods off quicktweak’s original, but if you want to see an similar alternative:

Screenshot: http://www.box.net/shared/0jipg4iqk7

my conkyrc: http://www.box.net/shared/1e8f8xsnjo

Changelog:
-Wifi speed and strength
-filesystem usage of my root and /home partitions
-adding my swap usage next to my RAM usage
-minimizing email to only show how many unread I have, not the subjects/senders

Thanks again for your awesome work!

And a question…
my the desktop behind conky flickers every now and then. I can’t isolate it: it’s less frequent then the update cycle, and without the variable gmail lines, conky doesn’t have to shift up or down. Anybody know why this happens?

Nice howto. A few minor tweaks later and vola! it’s looking good on Debian too. You can have the Debian logo instead of the Ubuntu logo simply by editing .conkyrc

TEXT
${color 6694B2}${font OpenLogos:size=45} J t

The ‘J’ is the Debian logo. If you want to look at what else is in openlogos.ttf one way is to use fontforge. Available through your favorite Debian repo.

Another something….the conkyscripts.gz unarchived is conkyscripts/ but .conkyrc points to ~/scripts so unarchiving that zip file in ~/scripts does not work. An easier way would be something like this:

wget http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/83257/conkyscripts.zip
unp conkyscripts.zip
mv conkyscripts scripts

To create the weather file simply use touch

touch weather

Thanks for the howto.

If you’re having trouble with the gmail, and you have a slash or dot in your email address or password try surrounding each of them with quotes.

[...] getting GMail and the weather on my desktop with Conky, I personally think I have something a bit better than the silly widget dashboard from OSX! You can [...]

Hi, great job on the conky, I’ve incorporated the weather and gmail into my own and love it. I’m just wondering about the pogodynka script. It seems to be set up to also display other weather information. I’d really like to set it up to display wind, sunrise and sunset but I’m not much of a coder and I don’t speak the language that script is commented in. Help would be greatly appreciated.

My conky also randomly changes size…

[...] QuickTweaks conky post Davmac’s conky ubuntuforums.org extensive and very long post with many conky screenshots Conky on GNOME-look.org [...]

[...] can be found from Yahoo Weather Original credit for the inspiration/weather script goes to this site. Wheres the love for amd!? Famous logo font doesn’t have it [...]

It works BEAUTIFULLY!!!

I had to change the:

weather po….sh to accomodate all the info that
was captured in the “weather” file to include
sunrise/set times; visibility; air pressure.. as well
as chaning the network ^ from eth1 to wlan0.

But it looks awesome!

The Sumarize Windoze port isn’t bad either..

Great job!

[...] the big news for today is that my post on conky setup(Gmail+Weather+Beauty right on your Ubuntu desktop) which was published last year grabbed #4 [...]

masters of linux out there will someone who can make the text-only look happen like the authors desktop please e-mail me at jesusfreak216@gmail.com i would be very apreciative

you need to add .encode(‘ascii’, ‘ignore’) to the end of line 39.

So

print ‘ ${color2}%s’ % atom.entries[i].title

becomes

print ‘ ${color2}%s’ % atom.entries[i].title.encode(‘ascii’, ‘ignore’)

Apparently with the latest version of ubuntu something changes, instead of the weather and other info just being in the background, it now is printed on top of other windows (still using the desktop background image) ends up with a 4″ or so smaller viewable window… So some tweaking will have to be done after agreeing via autoupdates to go to the newly pushed out ubuntu

Hi,
This looks great and seems to be working fine, however, I get this error when I start conky up in terminal (note: that conky appears to work just fine…)

localhost [127.0.0.1] 7634 (?) : Connection refused

Thoughts? Is this a problem?

Thanks,

Fae

I get the following errors when I run my conky:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File “/home/user/scripts/gmail_parser.py”, line 47, in
readmail(f, int(maxlen)) # Let the feed be chewed by feedparser
File “/home/user/scripts/gmail_parser.py”, line 39, in readmail
print ‘ ${color2}%s’ % atom.entries[i].title
UnicodeEncodeError: ‘ascii’ codec can’t encode character u’\xe1′ in position 40: ordinal not in range(128)

Only one e-mail subject is show, and “more..” does not show up.

Any clues?

Never mind the previous post, I already saw an earlier reply that fixed my problem. It would be good to add the following to the tutorial:

To have conky update itself, say every 15 minutes, do the following:

# crontab -e

Add this line:
0,15,30,45 * * * * killall -SIGUSR1 conky>/dev/null 2>&1

Save and you’re done! Now your weather, e-mail, etc will be updated every 15 min.

Hi,

I was having a problem with the weather.

I fixed with the following:

- Go to .fonts folder in your home directory.
- Rename the font wet____.ttf to weather.tff

[...] Instrucciones y descarga: aquí. [...]

I can’t get the weather and the hard drive temp to work. I try typing the echoed content of hddmonit.sh file into the terminal, and I get the following warning

[code]
josh@ubuntu:~$ nc localhost 7634
localhost [127.0.0.1] 7634 (?) : Connection refused
josh@ubuntu:~$ netcat localhost 7634
localhost [127.0.0.1] 7634 (?) : Connection refused
josh@ubuntu:~$ (nc localhost 7634 | cut -d'|' -f5)
localhost [127.0.0.1] 7634 (?) : Connection refused
josh@ubuntu:~$
[/code]

And the weather, well, I’m at a loss. Can anyone help?

On my computer, for the wireless networks to be detected, I changed ‘eth1′ to ‘wlan0.’

I made all my files and folders invisible and changed the references to them in each config files.

If anyone has some detailed advice on how to fix the weather and hdd, though, it’d be greatly appreciated.

I am not seeing the sun/clouds/whatever the symbol may be representing my weather, however the temperature is pulling correctly from the Yahoo website. How can I get the sun like you have?

Nevermind, fixed by running:

$ mv wef____.ttf weather.ttf

What do we add to .conkyrc to imbed @ replies from twitter and tasks from Remember the Milk?

This is not working for me, like a poster above me all it does is open up a little window on the bottom of my screen with a default conky script.

I think the problem is that I had to save everything in home/ben, and not home. How do you save to just home?

However, I have no idea because I am a newbie.

Thanks

How do you get the HDD temp in Fahrenheit its only showing up in Celsius, and the end C is not showing up?

[...] Gmail, Weather, Beauty on your Ubuntu Desktop | Quick Tweaks (tags: ubuntu linux conky) [...]

I receive the black box as well, described above. I’m thinking I don’t have some depenendencies installed, or I have not followed the instructions. When it says home folder, would it be either:
/home/
or would it be
/home/Billy/ (my username home folder)

thanks!

I think I followed every step, but when I launch conky it runs in a separate window and does not merge with the desktop

:’(

i used to have the blackbox also until i changed my conkyrc to .conkyrc maybe that’s same with u

To add a few more weather conditions in the conditions.sh file, could you give us a refrence for the echo statements for the weather conditions.
ex:
sunny——’A’
etc.

elif echo “$cnd” | grep -E -i -q ‘fair|sunny’; then
echo ‘A’

Nice howto. It improved my desktop view in beauty and functionality way. Thanx a lot.

I’m having the same thing. As far as I know I followed all the steps though :\

Anyone have any suggestions?

To prevent conky from being above all windows you need to modify your start up script. Change the sleep value to a higher number, for example:

sleep 35 &&
conky

[...] also using Conky. Here’s a tutorial on how to get Gmail, weather, and other stats embedded to your desktop with the help of it. For [...]

I’m having a weird problem where my conky setup refreshes every 5 minutes. It’s the same files I used from this post and it didn’t do it the first time I set it up but the time refreshes every 5 minutes. A little problematic when I want to know what time it is. Anyone know how to change this?

[...] ちなみに，デザインのセンスは0なのでこちらのサイトのConkeyの設定をモチーフ（パクリ？）にさせてもらいました [...]

Hi

All looks great but a couple of questions:

i) Is there any way of using another weather provider? I live in Brighton, UK and sometimes the data is way out of date. The UK met office might be better.

ii) If I get an email with a long subject line it moves the whole shebang across the screen to fit it in. I got one from an online music store today which was about 20 words and it moved it pretty much to the centre of the screen.

Thanks

Dan

I did all the above. Then I walked through it several times. I just get a black background and white fonts that look nothing like the picture above with the nice transparencies and stylized fonts. Is this just a matter of tweaking it further or did I do something wrong?

Hi there,

I love your Conky setup, but I’m have slight problems trying to get the text to wrap for the gmail script – for subject contents

http://img33.imageshack.us/img33/5344/screenshotmr.png
I would prefer it to cut off near where the Calendar ends

Does anyone else have this problem or a way to rectify it?

Thank You

I followed Daniel ^^ in changing to the correct URL for weather.

Now the “weather” file” gets the right conditions, such as:

Current conditions as of 2:53 pm CST
Fair

Feels Like:
69 °F
Barometer:
29.66 in and rising
Humidity:
53%
Visibility:
10 mi
Dewpoint:
51 °F
Wind:
S 23 mph
Sunrise:
6:58 am
Sunset:
5:17 pm

69°

HOWEVER,

Nothing shows up in Conky other than a sun and F/Barometer: F

Any ideas?

Nevermind,

I figured out the issue with my weather. I had to modify the pogodynka.sh script (with a little help from Google Translate) to get the parameters I wanted to see.

I had to do some head/tail commands from a terminal and found that the locations for some of the info had changed a little. Modifying the script to reflect these changes worked beautifully.

Thanks for the great blog!

Chris, you think you can share what changes you made? I think I have the same problem. weather file has proper data, but only a cloud shows up with no numbers.

I have the same thing and this just started a couple of days ago. Would love to get an answer for this

2nd part:

Here's my .conkyrc script, modified so that it shows the output based on my screenshot (I moved portions of the script around, commented out stuff I didn't need, and modified the eth1 to reflect as eth0 for my NIC)

use_xft yes
xftfont verdana:size=8
alignment top_right
xftalpha 0.8
own_window yes
own_window_type override
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager
double_buffer yes
draw_shades no
draw_outline no
draw_borders no
stippled_borders 10
border_margin 4
border_width 1
default_shade_color grey
default_outline_color black
default_color BADCDD
use_spacer none
no_buffers yes
uppercase no
color1 F8DF58

TEXT

${font Radio Space:size=14}${time %A %d %Y}
${font Radio Space:size=55}${time %I:%M %p}
# ${color 6694B2}${font OpenLogos:size=45} u t
${color BADCDD}${font weather:size=82}${execi 600 ~/scripts/conditions.sh}${color}${font}${voffset -25} ${execi 1200 ~/scripts/pogodynka.sh}

#${font weather:size=28}x ${font}HDD ${execi 1 ~/scripts/hddmonit.sh}°C

${font PizzaDude Bullets:size=16}v${font} Up: ${upspeed eth0} Kb/s
${font PizzaDude Bullets:size=16}r${font} Down: ${downspeed eth0} Kb/s

${font PizzaDude Bullets:size=16}M${font} Upload: ${totalup eth0}
${font PizzaDude Bullets:size=16}S${font} Download: ${totaldown eth0}

${color ffffff}${font StyleBats:size=16}A${font} CPU0: ${cpu cpu0}% ${cpubar cpu0}
${font StyleBats:size=16}A${font} CPU1: ${cpu cpu1}% ${cpubar cpu1}

${color F8DF58}${font StyleBats:size=16}8${font} Battery: ${battery_percent}% ${battery_bar}

${color F8DF58}${font FreeSans:size=16}@${font}${execpi 300 python ~/scripts/gmail_parser.py dittoisnot@gmail.com 7vailski 3}

${color C2E078}${font PizzaDude Bullets:size=16}J${font} Memory: $mem / $memmax

${font StyleBats:size=18}P${font} Uptime: ${uptime_short}

nice theme but gmail isnt working.have the feedparser installed.and cant get the tux and ubuntu logo justt shows as u and t

also whats the letter code for the freebsd demon?you know how in the conkyrc file its u t meaning ubuntu and tux

This is really cool.. but does any one know what should I do to get the weather working.. I can see the cloud or sun but I cant see any temperature.. what I see is just C/ Barometer: C

Here what i changed to get it all working again. It seems some of the lines shifted around so:
# ustalenie warto�ci zmiennych
stan=`head -n2 $plik | tail -n1`# Conditions
temp=`tail -n2 $plik | awk '{print $1}'`# Temperature
tempo=`head -n7 $plik | tail -n1`# Barometer
cisn=`head -n9 $plik | tail -n1`# Humidity
wiatr=`head -n15 $plik | tail -n1` # Wind
wilg=`head -n11 $plik | tail -n1`# Visibility
wsch=`head -n17 $plik | tail -n1` # Sunrise
zach=`head -n19 $plik | tail -n1`# Sunset

Thanks, had the same problem and that fixed it.

@sharee seems like weather.com has since changed their url structure. I’m having trouble setting this up as well.

i’ve resorted to checking the ubuntu forums for answers. no easy fix so far though.

Hi, can you upload the script file again, the files arent available, thanks.

super awesome. i love it.

managed to get everything going, minus my temp in celcius. well the temp is in F but i have a C displayed. i.e. it's 34 C in Montreal right now. if only!

tried the various suggestions around that on here but nothing panned out so far.

but i'm happy.

can anyone tell me how to configure the script to run on startup?

use ifconfig from command line to see which one you use (wlan0, eth0, eth1,…etc.) Then edit the .conkyrc file and replace eth1 as needed to get you up/downloads working.

for those that have problems with unicode character (ěščřžý etc),

replacing

print ' ${color2}%s' % atom.entries[i].title

with

print ' ${color2}%s' % atom.entries[i].title.encode('utf-8')

should do the trick. (gmail_parser.py that is)

For the Gmail script it works but it gives errors for some of us when handling Accented Characters so you need to convert them to avoid errors in printing.

I use a quick but efficient print variable.encode(“utf-8) (or you can try .encode(‘latin-1′) for ISO 8859-1 ) to receive both my english and french messages. It works fine now

Change made in check-gmail.py :
————————————————–
def readmail(feed, maxlen):
”’Parse the Atom feed and print a summary”’
atom = feedparser.parse(feed)
convert = ‘${color1} %s new email(s)\n’ % (len(atom.entries))
print convert.encode(‘utf-8′)
for i in range(min(len(atom.entries), maxlen)):
convert2 = ‘ ${color2}%s’ % atom.entries[i].title
print convert2.encode(‘utf-8′)
#uncomment the following lines if you want to show the name of the sender
convert3 = ‘ ${color1}%s’ % atom.entries[i].author
print convert3.encode(‘utf-8′)
—————————————————–

Hi,

I've got most of this working however I've got problems with the HDD temp not showing and the window doesn't integrate fully with the desktop. I've tried the own_window = no fix. This does work but as soon as I reboot the window then doesn't display at all!

I've tried using both the shell script and startup applications options to get round this problem and neither seem to work.

Can anyone point me in the right direction.

So my only problems with the script are the fact the weather only shows me the icon for current weather, the temperature doesn't display, instead looks like this "F/Barometer : F" also would like to know how to change the time to 12 hour time, instead of 24 hour.

Hey, I got everything working except the weather and gmail checker. I live in bangalore, India and according to weather.com my location id is INXX0012 (did not use yahoo weather because in the address bar it only displayed numbers and no letters and it didn't work either way). And for gmail checker i put in my username and tried both username@gmail.com password as well as username password. None seem to be working. Please Help ! :'(

Thank you very much for the gmail part. I have been looking at so many different scripts and solutions, but your gmail script worked like a charm.

Cheers

I have the same problem as @riijkart were the battery is constantly at 0 and the weather doesn’t show up, but it happens with anytheme. know a fix??

in the step 3: download the file and save in your home directory, when i open the link, it tells me

: Oopa 404. We can’t find the page you’re looking for. Check out our FAQ or forums for help. Or maybe you should try heading home

. pls what can i do about that?

Great stuff! Makes the whole desktop look so much more cooler.
Some gotchas:
- Make sure to rename conkyrc file to .conkyrc (DOTconkyrc). The file is downloaded as conkyrc.
- When you extract the scripts, these should get extracted directly under "scripts" directory for the default configurations to work. Nautilus "extract" script will extract the files into a new directory – conkyscripts.
- conky keeps looking for battery state in "/proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state". For whatever reason, i do not have BAT0 directory – only BAT1. So, changed the Battery line as below… (see BAT1 variable being added)
${color 014A7F}${font StyleBats:size=16}8${font} Battery: ${battery_percent BAT1}% ${battery_bar BAT1}
- in .conkyrc, changed references from "eth0" to "wlan0" since i am on wireless. Perhaps, most laptop users will have this configuration issue
- When you add conky to session startup, it creates a thin border arround conky and also it stays on top of all other windows. The thin spoils the integrated look and feel with the rest of the desktop. A dirty hack is to create a script to start conky once, kill and restart it with about 20-30 seconds delay.

Its not displaying the weather and HDD temp!! :'( I did exactly what the instructions said. Can someone help me out???

hi, i have done everything as the steps but i cannot seem to get the weather icons or temperature to appear where ass all the other fonts are fine. and gmail does not appear to work either? any help?

Have heard that using the RSS link to find the Weather ID in the URL has worked. But, it hasn't worked for me so far. :-

for those having problems with weather, gmail, hdd temp…make sure inside the scripts directory there is not an internal directory conky scripts..this was causing a problem for me..still cant get weather id to work so just deleted it from the script and am quite happy with the way it looks now…

Conky: /home/sumit/.conkyrc: 1: no such configuration: 'use_xft'
Conky: /home/sumit/.conkyrc: 2: no such configuration: 'xftfont'
Conky: /home/sumit/.conkyrc: 3: no such configuration: 'alignment'
Conky: /home/sumit/.conkyrc: 4: no such configuration: 'xftalpha'
Conky: /home/sumit/.conkyrc: 5: no such configuration: 'own_window'
Conky: /home/sumit/.conkyrc: 6: no such configuration: 'own_window_type'
Conky: /home/sumit/.conkyrc: 7: no such configuration: 'own_window_transparent'
Conky: /home/sumit/.conkyrc: 8: no such configuration: 'own_window_hints'
Conky: /home/sumit/.conkyrc: 9: no such configuration: 'double_buffer'
Conky: /home/sumit/.conkyrc: 10: no such configuration: 'draw_shades'
Conky: /home/sumit/.conkyrc: 11: no such configuration: 'draw_outline'
Conky: /home/sumit/.conkyrc: 12: no such configuration: 'draw_borders'
Conky: /home/sumit/.conkyrc: 13: no such configuration: 'stippled_borders'
Conky: /home/sumit/.conkyrc: 14: no such configuration: 'border_margin'
Conky: /home/sumit/.conkyrc: 15: no such configuration: 'border_width'
Conky: unknown variable font
Conky: unknown variable font
Conky: unknown variable font
Conky: unknown variable font
Conky: unknown variable font
Conky: unknown variable font
Conky: unknown variable font
Conky: unknown variable font
Conky: unknown variable font
Conky: unknown variable font
Conky: unknown variable font
Conky: unknown variable font
Conky: unknown variable font
Conky: unknown variable font
Conky: unknown variable font
Conky: unknown variable font
Conky: unknown variable font
Conky: unknown variable font
Conky: unknown variable font
Conky: unknown variable font
Conky: unknown variable font
Conky: unknown variable font
Conky: unknown variable font
Conky: unknown variable font
Conky: unknown variable font
Conky: unknown variable font
Conky: unknown variable font
Conky: not implemented obj type 15
${font} u t
${font}${font} F / Current Heat Index F
${font}x ${font}HDD 58�C

${font}v${font} Up: 0B Kb/s
${font}r${font} Down: 0B Kb/s
${font}M${font} Upload: 10.9MiB
${font}S${font} Download: 147MiB
${font}A${font} CPU0: 5% __________
${font}A${font} CPU1: 6% #_________
${font}8${font} Battery: 39% ####______
${font}@${font} 0 new email(s)
${font}J${font} 659MiB / 2.82GiB
${font}P${font} Work: 2h 10m
${font}Saturday 12 2011
${font}22:05
Conky: not implemented obj type 15
${font} u t
${font}${font} F / Current Heat Index F
${font}x ${font}HDD 58�C

I got these. Nothing shows up on my desktop. HELP!!!

The weather forecast and hdd temp do not work with my xfce4 on slackware 13.0. I've folowed the very instruction but with no seccess. What can I do?

This worked. Thank you.

if the ugly black window appears conky is not probably using .conkyrc

remember to put it in /home/name_of_your_user/

I am stuck with the weather, it shows "been F / Current heat index F"

anybody knows how to solve it?

Thanks dude. I have a question, can I use google instead of yahoo for the weather info?

hey guys. everything is working fine. but the weather doesn't show temperatur. it only says: Sunset C / Barometer C
who can help me out?

I have the same problem. I followed the instructions and tried the fixes in the comments but nothing worked.

Nice. . .thanks for tutorial. . .
My boring desktop look more cool

Wow.. thanks man.. for the exciting tutorial..

i folowed your directions to the letter and conky wont start…..this is my output

Conky: /home/rik/.conkyrc: 14: no such configuration: 'border_margin'
Conky: desktop window (300006e) is subwindow of root window (153)
Conky: window type – override
Conky: drawing to created window (0x4a00001)
Conky: drawing to double buffer
cat: /home/rik/weather: No such file or directory
Conky: can't open /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/uevent: No such file or directory
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rik/scripts/gmail_parser.py", line 46, in <module>
f = auth() # Do auth and then get the feed
File "/home/rik/scripts/gmail_parser.py", line 29, in auth
f = opener.open(_URL)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib.py", line 205, in open
return getattr(self, name)(url)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib.py", line 449, in open_https
return self.http_error(url, fp, errcode, errmsg, headers)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib.py", line 369, in http_error
result = method(url, fp, errcode, errmsg, headers)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib.py", line 663, in http_error_301
return self.http_error_302(url, fp, errcode, errmsg, headers, data)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib.py", line 632, in http_error_302
data)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib.py", line 659, in redirect_internal
return self.open(newurl)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib.py", line 205, in open
return getattr(self, name)(url)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib.py", line 449, in open_https
return self.http_error(url, fp, errcode, errmsg, headers)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib.py", line 369, in http_error
result = method(url, fp, errcode, errmsg, headers)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib.py", line 694, in http_error_401
return getattr(self,name)(url, realm)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib.py", line 776, in retry_https_basic_auth
return self.open(newurl)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib.py", line 205, in open
return getattr(self, name)(url)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib.py", line 449, in open_https
return self.http_error(url, fp, errcode, errmsg, headers)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib.py", line 369, in http_error
result = method(url, fp, errcode, errmsg, headers)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib.py", line 681, in http_error_401
errcode, errmsg, headers)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib.py", line 379, in http_error_default
raise IOError, ('http error', errcode, errmsg, headers)
IOError: ('http error', 401, 'Unauthorized', <httplib.HTTPMessage instance at 0xb736c9cc>)
what did i do wrong?

Thank you! This was a big help!

It took me a while, but I finally got the battery indicator working.
First: apt-get installed acpi and acpi-tools.
Then change the battery line to:
Battery: ${execi 10 (acpi -b | awk)} ${battery_bar BAT1}

Your battery may be called something else, however. To find out run acpi -b in terminal, and it should tell you the number. If it's different to BAT1 then put that in instead.

Now to get the weather and gmail working.