Conky on Gnome and more

How to fix transparency issues in GNOME, add temperature monitors and an unread email counter.

Conky is a really great tool when it comes to monitoring your system and spicing up your boring desktop in the process.

The Transparency

When I found out about it in this great video, I immediately wanted to try it out, so I installed Conky Manager, enabled a "widget", and was greeted by this: Great. No transparency and things are overlaying everywhere. After some research, I found this section in the Arch Wiki. I ended up replacing this own_window section

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 no
own_window_argb_value 0

with this one

own_window yes
own_window_type desktop
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_colour 000000
own_window_argb_visual yes
own_window_argb_value 255
own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager

And there you go: Much better!

Hard drive temperatures

After I finished fixing the conky widgets that came with conky-manager, I started customizing them. I wanted to display temperatures. For hard drives, this is quite easy, since there is a hddtemp conky variable that accepts a block device like /dev/sda/ as a parameter. However, since calling hddtemp in the terminal requires root permissions and conky should never run as root, we need to use its daemon. Enable and start it

sudo systemctl enable hddtemp
sudo systemctl start hddtemp

and you will see your hard drive temperature show up. However, when trying to access anything else than /dev/sda, conky will display N/A. This is because the hddtemp daemon only watches /dev/sda by default. You can change this by editing its service file:

sudo systemctl edit hddtemp

This will open a drop-in snippet in your favorite text editor. Edit it to override the ExecStart directive and add more hard drives to monitor like this:

[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/usr/bin/hddtemp -dF /dev/sda /dev/sdb

You should now be able to access all hard drives named in the service file.

Other temperatures

For other temperatures, like CPU or GPU, it is not that easy. There are at least two ways of doing this: Parsing the output of a tool like lm_sensors (sensors command) or writing scripts directly accessing them. I am going to cover the second method here.
I did some digging on the interwebs and found out that on Arch you can find most temperatures under /sys/bus/pci/drivers/. When digging around in there, I found the k10 (AMD CPU temperature chip) and the radeon driver folders. Under an odd named folder (probably PCIe adress) starting with 0000 you should find the hwmon subfolder. Dig around in there, and you will find files named temp1_input or similar. Try some of them out using cat and check them against sensors. When you have found the path, you can include it in a script like this:

#!/bin/bash
echo $(($(cat /sys/bus/pci/drivers/radeon/0000\\:01\\:00.0/hwmon/hwmon2/temp1_input) / 1000))

However, I had an occasion where the CPU temperature was moving back and forth hwmon/hwmon0 and hwmon/hwmon1 on each reboot. To counter that, use globbing:

#!/bin/bash
echo $(($(cat /sys/bus/pci/drivers/k10temp/0000\\:00\\:18.3/hwmon/hwmon[0,1]/subsystem/hwmon3/temp2_input) / 1000))

When your scripts work, you can include them in conky like this:

${execi 10 /path/to/your/script.sh}

where 10 is the time in between script calls in seconds.

Unread emails

At one point, I wanted to add an unread email counter to conky. Since I use IMAP and no local mailbox, I couldn't use conkys variables for that task. Luckily I found this script written in perl that works perfectly when included like shown above. But it is only for one account. Fort that purpose, I had to quickly learn some perl array stuff and came up with this script:

#!/usr/bin/perl

# gimap.pl by gxmsgx
# modified by chameleon for multiple accounts
# description: get the count of unread messages on gmail imap

use strict;
use Mail::IMAPClient;
use IO::Socket::SSL;

my @account1 = (\'host\', port, \'username\', \'password\');
my @example = (\'imap.gmail.com\', 993, \'max@gmail.com\', \'password\');
my @accounts = ([@gmail1],[@example]);

my $i = 0;
my $unseen_sum = 0;
while($i < scalar @accounts) {
  my $socket = IO::Socket::SSL->new(
     PeerAddr => $accounts[$i][0],
     PeerPort => $accounts[$i][1],
    )
    or die \"socket(): $@\";

  my $client = Mail::IMAPClient->new(
     Socket   => $socket,
     User     => $accounts[$i][2],
     Password => $accounts[$i][3],
    )
    or die \"new(): $@\";

  if ($client->IsAuthenticated()) {
      my $msgct;

      $client->select(\"INBOX\");
      $msgct = $client->unseen_count||\'0\';
      $unseen_sum += $msgct;
  }

  $client->logout();
  $i++;
}
print \"$unseen_sum\
\";

Resources

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Conky
https://github.com/brndnmtthws/conky/wiki/Configure

I hope you liked this article and, if you have any suggestions on what to add here or corrections, write a comment :)