Conky is a light-weight system monitoring tool combined with a fully-customized desktop theme, which can completely change your Linux desktop experience. Using Conky, you will get a fully personalized desktop theme, populated with an eye-catching smart clock, current date and time, as well as the current status of your Linux system such as used/free HDD space, RAM and CPU utilization. Conky interface can also keep you updated with up/down time of the system and uploaded/downloaded data traffic. The point is, Conky is fully configurable and scriptable, being able to collect and display almost any type of information directly on an X window.

Conky works pretty much the same way on different Linux distros. This tutorial will guide you to install and configure Conky on Linux. While Conky was tested on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS in this tutorial, you can configure Conky on other distros using the same instructions.