Cutebuntu

Desktop wallpaper: Gnarled
Icons: Simple-Moblin
Pekwm theme: My own
GTK theme: Slightly modded perfection
Fonts: BasicDots, CKAS, SunandMoon, Zebra and ZooWoodCutsM
Conky (21/10/09)
Tint2

I like having weather report on my screen and being quite big fan of Conky I prefer using it. What I want isn’t that much, all I need it temperature and information about whether it’s sunny or not. Kaivalagi has excellent weather script Conky Forecast, it’s really versatile, but bit big for my needs. I used also a weather script which I found in ArchLinux forums. For some reason I thought it might be good idea try to use rss feed. I happened to see site called rssWeather.com mentioned in CrunchBang Forums. Conky has rss variable, but as far I know it only fetches the title. And while title was fine, it told the relevant information, it also had irrelevant stuff (and it’s ugly and takes space). For example this:

London, UNITED KINGDOM Weather :: 16C Mostly clear

Okey it tells the location, but I have fairly narrow Conky and the most important part was almost cut away… And if the actual content is this:

16C Mostly clear

Of course I rather have that. Finding solution was bit tricky (I’m not a script master ;) ). I found nice rss script for conky UbuntuForums, but I had to tweak it bit though to get it show the content instead of title. I opened feed’s source code and checked what xml tags were surrounding the content (<description>content</description>). After this I simply changed following part of script:

sed -e 's/<\/title>/\n/g' |\
grep -o '<title>.*' |\
sed -e 's/<title>//' |\


to this:

sed -e 's/<\/description>/\n/g' |\
grep -o '<description>.*' |\
sed -e 's/<description>//' |\


So instead of the title I get the content. :D Under are the relevant lines in my conkyrc:

City A : ${execi 3600 ~/bin/conky_rss.sh "url_rss" 1 1 }
City B : ${execi 3600 ~/bin/conky_rss.sh "url_rss" 1 1 }

This fetches the weather from two cities every hour and first number “1” tells how many articles you want to be shown from the feed. I don’t know meaning of the second “1” but, if it was “0” it didn’t work. Replace the url_rss with the feed you wish.

This is how it looks like on my desktop:

• conky-rss.sh
• .conkyrc

I recently decided to try Openbox as my window manager and haven’t changed since then. Well I have still a lot to configure, but results so far have been very teaching. Anyway I wanted to present in this second post my Conky. Which is a very customisable lightweight system monitor for desktop.

I based my conky -code on this one line conky (by Lyrae). It includes a script which informs whether all packages are up to date or not. I’m not a Perl expert, so I don’t know yet if I was able to modify the script to work in Ubuntu. But at the moment Conky shows the time, mails (POP3), current song in Exaile, how long system has been on, net uploading and downloading, how many GiB I have used in my home folder, memory and CPU usage. To make it little prettier I used few special fonts to show the stars (Seeing Stars) and arrows (PizzaDude Bullets).

Hanna’s Conky and the code. I recommend checking the Ubuntu Geek for further instructions :) . If you want to use my code, you can replace the code in .conkyrc file (a hidden file in home directory) with mine.

Useful Links:
Conky (Conky variables)
Some conky codes can be found in Gnome-Look.org, write in search field conky. Check also for example this thread: Post your .conkyrc files w/ screenshots in Ubuntu Forums.

ps. A little hint for myself :P , make scripts executable, surprisingly things may start working :blush:

pps. Only 7 days till Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron :D !!!