Thanksgiving means Geek

Or at least, for me it does. Geek and animals as I house-sit various beasties. As a result, I’ve spent half a day merrily bustling away at my Ubuntu install. (Look, some of you redecorate rooms or tweak cars – I putz with my operating system.)

I used to run blackbox for windows over… well, everything from WindowsME through Vista. So while I really enjoyed Ubuntu’s “just works” and the spiffiness of GNOME, I’m really a minimalistic kind of guy.

So I installed OpenBox as my window manager. I’m not going to go through the whole process, but I am going to point out a couple of things that tripped me up (or made things easier).

I’ve got a Conky config (below) that’s a single bar across the top of a 1280px screen. Key features include a simple current weather, barometer, LAN & WAN IP address, wireless network strength, automatic toggle of bandwidth measures between wired & wireless, and low refresh rate so it’s not going to eat your CPU for breakfast.

Enjoy!

(Edited to fix a bug)

#avoid flicker
double_buffer yes

#own window to run simultanious 2 or more conkys
own_window yes
own_window_transparent no
#own_window_type normal
#own_window_type panel
own_window_type desktop
#own_window_type dock
own_window_hints undecorate,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager

net_avg_samples 3
cpu_avg_samples 3

#borders
draw_borders no

#shades
draw_shades no
draw_outline no

#position
gap_x 0
gap_y 0
alignment top_left

#behaviour
update_interval 2

#colour
default_color 8f8f8f
#default_shade_color 000000
#own_window_colour 262729

#font
use_xft yes
xftfont sans:size=8

# Force UTF8? note that UTF8 support required XFT
#override_utf8_locale yes

#to prevent window from moving
use_spacer right
minimum_size 1270 0

TEXT
${color white}GET EXCITED AND MAKE SHIT $color|${color white} ${desktop_name} $color| ${color white}${font ConkyWeather:size=8}${execi 300 conkyForecast –datatype=WF}$color${font sans:size=8} ${execi 310 conkyForecast –datatype=HT –hideunits}/${execi 320 conkyForecast –datatype=LT –hideunits} | ${execi 330 conkyForecast –datatype=CT} ${execi 340 conkyForecast –datatype=BR}/${execi 350 conkyForecast –datatype=BD} | ${font StyleBats:size=9}a$font ${color white}${cpu cpu0}%$color | ${font StyleBats:size=9}4$font ${color white}$memperc%$color | Uptime: ${color e0e0e0}${uptime_short}${color} | ${font StyleBats:size=9}b$font ${color white}${acpitemp}$color | ${font StyleBats:size=9}o$font ${color white}${addr wlan0}$color | ${font StyleBats:size=9}x$font ${color white}${execi 60 wget -q -O – checkip.dyndns.org | sed -e ‘s/[^[:digit:]|.]//g’}$color | ${if_up wlan0}${color white}${wireless_essid wlan0}$color::${color e0e0e0}${wireless_link_qual wlan0}${color}| ${if_existing /proc/net/route eth0}${font StyleBats:size=9}5$font ${color e0e0e0}${upspeed eth0}${color} / ${color e0e0e0}${downspeed eth0} ${color}${else}${if_existing /proc/net/route wlan0}${font StyleBats:size=9}5$font ${color e0e0e0}${upspeed wlan0}${color} / ${color e0e0e0}${downspeed wlan0}${color}${endif}