Notices

Alright, this is by no means done, and my personal set up would incoorporate the new versions' text-over-bar feature (which I'm still trying to figure out). I also need to figure out how to fetch keyboard slid-open/slid-closed state with the command line, and what the command is to enable rotation (the I can run it once with exec at the beginning of the conky file and you don't have to enable rotation manually).

However, I just wanted to show that it is working:



Yes, I know you all just came, but before you get too excited: it's not that great yet. As I said, Conky doesn't auto rotate, so you have to do that manually each time you launch it. Two, keyboard open/closed state detection isn't built in yet, so until I find out how to query that with a shell command (or someone tells me), you're going to get odd-looking layout changes when you hold it in a portrait/inverse-portrait position, but have the keyboard out (because the conky layout will change, but hildon won't rotate conky itself).

On the technical side of things, Conky has to do a dbus call, grep it, then awk it, then compare it to a string, every few seconds to make this work. So the more instant you want your conky to switch portrait and landscape modes, the more often your processor will have to run the command - this is not exactly good on battery (but not as bad, as, say, playing a video game like liquid war - if you only use conky occasionally and don't let it idle too much it the background, it should be about the same use-wise. (I found myself lowering the refresh interval down to 2, and will possibly put it to 1, just to make it change orientation without too big of a delay. But if you don't think about it too much and just accept that it takes a few seconds to change orientation in-Conky, you should be good.)

Another problem is the graphs - Conky basically has two seperate graphs of everything (even if it graphs the same thing) when run this way, one for each mode. They seem to be kept in memory and progress naturally on their own, but they do not share their data, and each logs the data that was occuring when it was displayed. So if I launch Conky (presumably in landscape), go launch app manager or whatever, then come back to Conky, landscape's CPU and load graphs will show a spike, but when you switch to portrait, the graph will be blank. It will start to show whatever values happen until you switch to landscape again (wherein you'll see the original spike from launching app manager, and black gaps after you switched to portrait..). This applies to graph functions - bar and everything else that doesn't record anything obviously works as normal.

If someone wants the config file, I'm attaching it. But keep in mind it's not exactly ideal. It doesn't have anything new or fancy beyond the landscape and portrait layouts includes simultaneously. Also, I'm pretty sure I have at least one inefficient battery level fetch in the landscape orientation (You'll notice that it shows battery charge in two places. This was for testing, and I'm getting rid of it on my own time after the 1.3 Power Kernel is out and I'm certain BME + Advanced Power Monitor + bq27x00_battery. I also have some overlapping text in the portrait mode currently - as you can see in the screenshot). However, you can use the skeleton for making your own configs with portrait and landscape support.

- Edit -
The conf file linked, the actual displayed "portrait" or "landscape" text for orientation is plaintext. For the sake of this version, I just made the portrait layout report portrait and landscape layout report landscape. The N900 can also report an "unknown" orientation state (when laying on a flat surface, for instance) - I have set it up so that portrait = portrait layout, otherwise, landscape layout. But of course, all of this can be edited too.

Also, can someone explain to me how to attach a file so that it has that "click for full size image" bar above it? Or do I have to host the image elsewhere, then link to it, for that to happen?
- End Edit -

Advice, if you see an if/else/endif tag in an odd place, there's a reason for it - if you are using either the $if_(blah) or the $else for a completely blank area, if the tag is on its own line, you'll end up with a blank line. If the tag is in a line with something else, the 'enters' end up inside the text to be exluded.

conky.txt

I suppose 1.8.0.5 would be ideal but the fact that th title is conky-n900-1.8.5 makes it less important. Carry on as you were then!

I've only just installed it, I thought the lua issue was something to do with my not getting the PR1.3 update (UK user now flashed to global). Now that's sorted and having followed theonelaw's method, I've managed to get it working. Looks good so far!

Hi, I got the latest from the garage and the .conf.txt frm the #1 post and renamed to conky.conf under MyDocs. Now this is how it looks. Just wondering if this is how its supposed to look like coz it kinda looks like its all jumbled up

Yes, that's how it looks with default config file.

Hi guys:
i got three conky applications showed running on conky :s with 7, 6 and 3% CPU usage.....i don't understand it, it's a problem, or not??? thanksss

Well, you COULD actually tell us the names of the apps that showed up, so we could help you.

For the most part, that's probably perfectly normal. I have hildon-desktop running in the 5-8 % CPU range. Xorg logging is a little under that.

However, something interesting for the people testing conky, since this fella just asked the above question, I went to run top in xterm just to check:

Conky, running at somewhere around 4-8 (mostly 7.something) %CPU. Except I don't have conky launched.

"PID 25107 PPID 1 USER user STAT S RSS 1464 /usr/bin/conky -d -c /etc/conky/conky.conf"

Ran:
Output:
20416 user 30904 S /usr/bin/conky -d -c /home/user/MyDocs/conky.conf
25107 user 27764 S /usr/bin/conky -d -c /etc/conky/conky.conf
(And it also output "grep conky", but that's because grep identified itself greping conky as one of the processes to grep.)

Ran:
killall conky

Then did the ps |grep "conky" again:

The /usr/bin/conky -d -c /etc/conky/conky.cong - the one that was eating 7% CPU, vanished. The other one, that pointed to the MyDocs conky.conf file, remained, even after another killall conky. However, that process doesn't seem to be eating any CPU.

I did not reboot between now and installing this latest conky. So it may have been a post-install thing - not my area of expertise. Anyone who hasn't rebooted or ran killall conky since you installed the new version care to run top and tell us what it reports?

Can't help you. I rebooted mine several times.

BTW, can anybody tell me how are those alignr (% at RAM or CPU) values related to anything? To me it seems that the reference is the last pixel in a row and they are in some negative relation with last pixel although the number in value is positive. But what really bothers me is that all my numbers are quite different and they all appear more or less at the same position in a row. I'm conky noob, this is actually my first attempt to edit conf file and I would like to know what I'm actually doing instead of putting random numbers until things start to look good.

Thanks:
i run ps | grep "conky" and gave this:

2633 user 27892 S conky
8478 user 31548 S /usr/bin/conky -d -c /etc/conky/conky.conf
8517 user 2092 S grep conky

then i run:

killall conky

conky was killed and closed..then i open it again and run ps | grep " conky" again and wave me this:

8582 user 31548 S /usr/bin/conky -d -c /etc/conky/conky.conf
8604 root 2088 S grep conky

i've seem the other conky process was closed...
many thanks!!!...

but another question, this is gonna happen again? and can be fixed only by this way?

a note: my hildon desktop when the n900 is mostly inactive shows only a 0,33% CPU usage.

another note: at the moment i have only one conky process running, whit 3-5% CPU usage, before this there was 3 conky process, one with 7% CPU, another wiht 6% CPU and the last with 3% CPU, i think that was strange.

Oh you people and restarting. :P (You can still see if Conky runs while not launched anyway, both before and after first launch of Conky after a reboot.)

Anyway, to answer your question (though I'm not looking at the .conf file right now so I'm only making an educated guess from memory what you're talking about), ${alignr ###} is basically like ${goto ###}, but instead of just going to that pixel, you're right-aligning the text following the alignr to that pixel.

Basically, if you noticed how ${goto #} works, it takes all the text after it on that line, and starts it from the x-axis pixel number you designated. Meaning, the very left side of the screen is 0 (or 1, I'm not 100% sure how conky processes it), then the middle of the screen on the N900 (since the display is 800x480) would be 400 (or, again, 399, depending on how Conky does it).

And alignr (without a value specified - just $alignr) takes something, and aligns it to the right edge of the screen. Put the two together, and you get ${alignr #} = align something the way you would to the right edge of the screen, but instead of the edge, you use whatever the horizontal pixel number you wrote in. So $alignr and ${alignr 800} do the same thing basically. Anything less than that and the right side of the text/graph/bar being aligned is fixed to that particular number.

So will place the h of the right-most "blah" against an imaginary vertical line 300 pixels away from the left edge of the screen.

Sorry if I seem condescending when saying any of the above - I was writing this both for your benefit and for the benefit of any other readers. And tried to make it as intuitive as possible (which the 'imaginary line at...' visualization is the most intuitive when thinking about these things for me).

I've rebooted too. I had an issue trying your conky.conf that resolved itself when I pasted the contents into an empty file, renaming it conky.conf and then restarting conky. I think it had something to do with the end of line character problem you sometimes get when transferring from Windows to Unix. Before that conky would start up 'in the background' because it could not read the conky.conf file.

Btw I liked your file. One question though Did you manage to get it displaying the window in the actual portrait mode, ie when you hold the phone in portrait you don't have to turn your head to read it? On mine it stays in landscape but the formatting shifts to portrait, so the text goes on below the bottom of the screen. This is even if I start the program with the phone held in portrait mode. Nevertheless, kudos to you for making progress on that front.

As for the graph problem, there must be a way of logging the data since conky has started and then conky graphing that data, maybe it can be done with lua_graph, or else a little script using execi, although that command is more cpu hungry...

taken from the conky objects page.

Maybe once it's all working properly Creamy Goodness can patch the execi commands used into conky.