Well to get conky to work you have to edit the ~/.conkyrc file.
It's a bit of a headfull at first, but once you get the idea you can go and look at the sample configuration files on conky's home site and copy what they have.
Here is what I have. This shows 'system temp' and 'cpu temp'
${color lightgrey}CPU Temp:$color${i2c 9191-0290 temp 2}+10 $alignr${color l ightgray}Sys Temp:$color${i2c 9191-0290 temp 1}
Notice the 'i2c' keyword.
If you check out your /etc/sensors.conf and then do a search for the beginning of your chipset name then you can find out what corrisponds to what.
/etc/sensors.conf is a file that just changes the 'temp1' to a more useful string like 'cpu temp' and then often is used to perform calculations to get the right voltage or temp reading.
So here is my sensors output:
w83627ehf-isa-0290
Adapter: ISA adapter
VCore: +1.32 V (min = +0.00 V, max = +1.74 V)
in1: +12.51 V (min = +13.46 V, max = +12.62 V) ALARM
AVCC: +3.31 V (min = +1.52 V, max = +3.68 V)
3VCC: +3.33 V (min = +3.76 V, max = +3.57 V) ALARM
in4: +2.04 V (min = +1.00 V, max = +2.04 V)
in5: +1.58 V (min = +2.04 V, max = +1.77 V) ALARM
in6: +5.07 V (min = +5.09 V, max = +6.53 V) ALARM
VSB: +3.25 V (min = +4.08 V, max = +2.91 V) ALARM
VBAT: +3.09 V (min = +4.05 V, max = +0.45 V) ALARM
in9: +1.58 V (min = +1.51 V, max = +1.91 V)
Case Fan: 1088 RPM (min = 927 RPM, div = 8)
CPU Fan: 0 RPM (min = 55 RPM, div = 128) ALARM
Aux Fan: 0 RPM (min = 55 RPM, div = 128) ALARM
fan4: 0 RPM (min = 10546 RPM, div = 128) ALARM
fan5: 0 RPM (min = 85 RPM, div = 128) ALARM
Sys Temp: +27°C (high = -41°C, hyst = -66°C) ALARM
CPU Temp: +16.0°C (high = +80.0°C, hyst = +75.0°C)
AUX Temp: +45.5°C (high = +80.0°C, hyst = +75.0°C)
So I do a search through the file for w83627ehf and I find out that people figure that temp 2 is for cpu and temp 1 is for system.
Notice that my temperature is off. I don't know why, I figure the sensor is just very innaccurate at low temperatures. It would gives the same reading in the bios except in the bios when you go to the hardware sensors screen it puts a artificial load on cpu to raise it's temperature. Took me a while to figure out what was going on...
I figure it's because my cpu is operating right around room temperature, do to my massive 'ninja' heatsink. So that is why I have the +10 on there to remind myself of this. I figure it can't be off by more then 10 degrees.
Oh well.
One of the reasons I like conky is because I can show per cpu core usage, which is neat.
${color lightgrey}CPU0 Usage:$color ${cpu cpu1}% ${cpubar cpu1}
${color lightgrey}CPU1 Usage:$color ${cpu cpu2}% ${cpubar cpu2}
One of the things that I noticed that kinda sucked was I have it setup to monitor network connections also, because I saw a screenshot of it and thought it looked usefull. Unfortunately the sample configuration that guy was using used FQDN to identify connections. For my network this was too slow to run every second or so and it made conky behave badly, do changed it to do ip addresses.
Luckily conky has pretty complete documentation.
http://conky.sourceforge.net/
So you can find out all the little secret things it can do. For example the music player I like to use is called MPD. It's network/unix oriented so it's easy to combine with other programs. Conky supports displaying song info from that. Also it supports xmms.
Also you can write your own little bash scripts or programs to display output into conky, but the tricky part is that they have to be very simple and quick so that they don't have a adverse impact on system performance or conky refresh rates.
Ubuntu has some stuff on it:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HowtoConky140
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