The images in this blog post were originally published on my old blog, My Little Desktop. Which is still up, if you care to read through (although much of the information is now outdated).
Everyone starts somewhere.
I can’t remember exactly when I discovered Conky, but I’m gonna go ahead and blame the Ubuntu Forums. When I got started on Conky (a lightweight system monitor for X), I was running Ubuntu on an Acer Aspire One netbook. Remember netbooks? There’s a reason they really aren’t around anymore…they were famously underpowered and usually came with obscure Linux distros pre-loaded to keep the price down. They were really excellent at browsing the ‘net (which the name implies) but not so great at…well, anything else, really. However, I blasted the obscure Linux distro off mine and loaded Ubuntu instead, and started playing with Conky.
Now, it turns out Conky has some pretty awesome features and can do some pretty gorgeous things (see my other posts on this subject). But at the beginning it was just stats. I needed (wanted) to see what my computer was doing, and what was impacting its performance, without opening up a resource-heavy monitor. Even back then, though, I wanted my boring old stats to look nice. So I colored them nicely and picked out desktop wallpaper that worked well with them. Have a look at some of the basic stats I used, back in the day, in the gallery below. Enjoy!
