Conky on Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon
I recently installed Conky on Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon and chose the Gotham theme widgets to display on the desktop. However the next minute I noticed, that on going to the desktop by clicking the show desktop applet on the panel, made the conky widgets disappear.
I checked all configurations in Conky Manager and tried to find any relevant option to control this behaviour but there was none. Then looked up google and came across many forum posts discussing the same issue. It had to do with the conky configuration file.
Fix the Conky configuration file
However it was a bit tricky to find and fix the right configuration file. Most of the forums posts and blogs talk about editing the ~/.conkyrc file which might not exist on your system. Some mention about editing the /etc/conky/conky.conf file which will have no effect.
The correct configuration file lies in the theme directory inside the directory named conky-manager in the home directory.
desktop ~ $ cd conky-manager/ desktop ~/conky-manager $ ls conky-startup.sh themes desktop ~/conky-manager $ cd themes/ desktop ~/conky-manager/themes $ ls Conky MIUI Cowon Conky Gold&Grey LSD NvidiaPanel verti-color Conky Seamod CPUPanel Gotham MaxConky Torn Paper Clone desktop ~/conky-manager/themes $ cd Gotham/ desktop ~/conky-manager/themes/Gotham $ ls config fonts info.txt preview.png desktop ~/conky-manager/themes/Gotham $ cd config/ desktop ~/conky-manager/themes/Gotham/config $ ls Gotham desktop ~/conky-manager/themes/Gotham/config $ cat Gotham
I am using the Gotham theme, so the configuration file to edit is
~/conky-manager/themes/Gotham/config/Gotham
Find out the section for own_window settings. It should look something like this.
own_window yes own_window_type normal own_window_transparent yes own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager own_window_colour 000000 own_window_argb_visual yes own_window_argb_value 0
Change the value of own_window_type to desktop
own_window_type desktop
Save the configuration file. Conky will automatically restart itself as soon as the configuration file is saved. Now the widgets do not disappear on clicking the show desktop applet on the panel.
Note -
After changing the window type to desktop you shall have to change the values of horizontal and vertical gaps to fit the widget in the proper place on the screen. This can be done directly inside the configuration file by changing the values of following 2 fields
gap_x 730 gap_y 30
Keep changing the values till you find the widget in the right place.
Additional notes
Conky uses a startup script to launch the widgets. The startup script is located in the conky-manager directory. It is the startup script that specifies the configuration file to use.
~/conky-manager $ cat conky-startup.sh killall conky cd "/home/mahaveer/conky-manager/themes/Gotham" conky -c "/home/mahaveer/conky-manager/themes/Gotham/config/Gotham" &
Worked like a charm! Thank you very much, sir. Mine is the minimalistic one packed in Parted Magic and now works OK in my Linux Mint.
Thanks, this worked perfectly for me, Ubuntu 14.04.01
if you click the edit as file from conky-manager you can go straight to the file
thanks. I am familiar with editing my ~/.conkyrc file and since the changes to this file do seem to work for everything else, I edited the ~/.conkyrc file but it doesn’t seem to have worked.
I could not find any of these files or directories:
usr/share/conky-manager/themepacks/
~/.conky/
~/.conky-manager/
anyone with any further ideas?
Thanks. This did the trick for me on ubuntu 14.04.1 (unity desktop). The conky config file in this dirtribution is, as you mentioned, named ~/.conkyrc
I have enjoyed your help with the Conky app…thanks. I have a problem trying to follow this post however. I tried to change directory as listed above but none existed. So I searched for the file and found it, but cant get to it…. im a newbie and need help. My config file for the gotham theme seems to be located at usr/share/conky-manager/themepacks/ and is in a compressed file called default-themes-2.0cmtp.7z, I can open it in a text editor but dont have permission or ability to save it in the compressed file. how do I use the terminal to get to it and fix it as you have done.
thanks
In the newer version the files are hiding in ~/.conky/THEMENAME
Hope that helps
This was very useful.
Thank you