I just got around to putting Conky on my laptop, which I installed Ubuntu Lucid sometime this Spring. In the past, I have toyed around with Conky and had it on most of my Ubuntu installations. This time I wanted to go with a little bit different design and add some useful features like external and internal ip address and temperatures. Also my old Conky was a little buggy on things like weather when I didn't have an internet connection.
Enter Conky-Colors. http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/CONKY-colors?content=92328
Conky-Colors is just an easy way to configure Conky, Conky by the way is very hard to configure. The instructions on the website worked really good and were flawless for me, other than I skipped one step which caused permission errors on the Hard Drive temperature. These are the same steps from the above link.
$sudo aptitude install python-statgrab ttf-droid hddtemp curl lm-sensors conky-all
$sudo chmod u+s /usr/sbin/hddtemp #Do not forget this. I did.
$sudo sensors-detect #answering Yes (default) to all questions, even that last one that defaults to No
Now restart your session
Download and extract the conky-colors.tar.gz and type in terminal.
$make
$./conky-colors --help
$./conky-colors
$make install
Now basically you just run ./conky-colors with the parameters to build you config file. Then run make install. My conky-colors command is:
./conky-colors --theme=gnome-human --cpu=2 --network --eth=0 --eth=1 --hd=default --hdtemp1=sda --cputemp --battery --right --unit=F --ubuntu --nvidia --proc=5 --weather=71449
