I uploaded a new screenshot:

The conky with weather pictures in it is stolen from RAMC's conkyrc which you can find on the Gentoo MB and also apparently here. There's a python script there to fetch and display weather info.

Whoever thought up the idea of making a font that consists of little weather pictures was pretty clever. Whoever thought up making a font that consists of Linux distro emblems has a bit too much time on his hands.

Oddly enough, Unicode itself includes glyphs for weather symbols. e.g. this is Unicode character 2603:

☃

If your font supports it, it should show up as a snowman. If your font doesn't support it, it may show up as an ice cube.

Good:

• Installing Beryl was brain-dead easy: add a repository and apt-get install beryl. About the same as Gentoo I guess, where you'd layman -S whatever-the-repo-name-is and then emerge beryl. Except Ubuntu didn't take 30 minutes to install it, and it was nice and tested and likely to work. I'm using the Emerald theme called "kind of blue". It's simple and looks nice and most important does NOT look like Vista or OS X. The only thing I don't like about all of this is having all these third-party repositories; for example I needed yet another one for the beta nvidia drivers. But I suppose it's not much different or worse than using overlays in Gentoo.

• I got lm-sensors working. Again it was mostly easy; I followed this guide, sort of winging it on a few steps. There are a LOT of guides for ubuntu that assume you know nothing. If you know anything at all, it's more than enough information, usually. Anyways other than that it was a matter of apt-get install lm-sensors and then sensors-detect which tells you which kernel modules you need. (I had to run some bash script to create some device nodes first.) I modprobed those myself, and restarted conky, but conky hung without outputting anything. Turns out the sensors show up a bit differently in Ubuntu than they did in Linux. I had to change my ${i2c temp 1} to ${i2c 9191-0290 temp 1} in ~/.conkyrc. Took me a while to figure that one out. Ubuntu must be detecting more than one i2c device. Even after getting that right, conky wouldn't work until I killed and restarted X. Strange. Works now though.

Bad:

• My printer (Canon iP1600) refuses to work in Ubuntu. Every site I check for every distro says that there is no Linux support for this printer at all (except, ironically, Gentoo). But I had it working in Gentoo, unless I've been imagining the past year. I tried the iP2200 drivers, and a bunch of other things, and nothing works. I tried some drivers from a site called turboprint; it worked, but it prints a huge logo over top of everything you print and if you want to disable the logo you have to pay $40 for the driver. Screw that. I'll probably set up my old 550MHz computer, stick Windows XP on it, set it to load VNC by default, and stick it in a corner somewhere with my printer plugged into it.

Someone asked me to post my conkyrc so I did. I also posted all the Ruby scripts that I use with it. If you don't mind spawning 6 or 7 Ruby interpreters every couple minutes, you might find them useful, though they are extremely simple.

Click for full-size version. In the first shot you can see the "wave" effect in progress that occurs any time a window is unmapped; the window sort of waves and dissolves. Beryl's "Animations" plugin lets you specify animations for mapping, unmapping, focusing, and min/maxing windows. There are some nice effects too, like the "genie getting sucked into a bottle" thing that OS X has, and many others. Either these things are new or I never noticed them before.

Too many effects really does get on your nerves after a while though. For example you can set windows to "shiver" very slightly when focusing them. The little bit of feedback does help you notice when a window is being focused, and given a dense collection of windows it can help you notice WHICH window is being focused. But switching window focus is something that happens way too often, and seeing your windows shivering for the 40,000th time is liable to drive a person insane.

I'm running KDE here. My collection of Conky scripts continues to grow. I plan to upload more of them as I refine them enough that they're usable by anyone other than myself. My first thought is always "Ew, look how many instances of Ruby I'm spwaning, running all those scripts!" My second thought is that I have a dual-core processor and 2 GB of RAM. 99% of the time, my CPU is sitting there idling. I could probably set it to spawn an instance of Ruby every second without noticing any difference. Three or four every 5 minutes isn't going to kill anyone.

I wrote a Ruby script that parses a Yahoo weather RSS feed and prints it in a form suitable for use in Conky. This is what it looks like:

The source code is here. Bugs are likely, I wrote it in 20 minutes. It requires the xml-simple Ruby module, but that's in portage (emerge xml-simple).

I posted earlier about getting Conky to be transparent in KDE. Unsetting and resetting the "Show icons on desktop" and "Allow programs in desktop window" options would allow Conky to look correct when transparent. Otherwise it would be a black box.

This is OK but it's a hassle to do this every time I restart KDE. Via various posts on the Gentoo forums I finally realized WHY this works (I think). Conky's pseudo-transparency works by reading the root window, and then compositing itself onto that. The root window is apparently not what normally shows in KDE when you're looking at your desktop background. KDE apparently draws another window on top of the root window and displays the desktop window there (including your background wallpaper and icons). Underneath that is the REAL root window, and it's entirely blank by default. Conky sees that real root window and composites itself on top, resulting in blackness.

When you tell KDE not to "Show icons on desktop", apparently KDE then defaults to setting the background of the REAL root window. So switching this option on and off results in the real root window's appearance matching KDE's "fake" root window.

Interestingly, in KDE if you do this:

1. Set "Show icons on desktop" to true.
2. Set a background.
3. Set "Show icons on desktop" to false, then back to true.
4. Change your background.
5. Start a transparent Conky.

Conky will be properly transparent, but it will use the FIRST background you selected, not the second. This leads me to believe I'm right.

So the real way to get a nice transparent Conky in KDE is to set the background of the root window using a program like feh.

ppurka posted in this thread a great automated way to do this in KDE:

feh --bg-scale `dcop kdesktop KBackgroundIface currentWallpaper 1`

If you're like me and use centered wallpaper, use --bg-center instead. Incidentally this is the relevant section of my Conky config file:

own_window yes
own_window_type desktop
own_window_transparent yes
own_window_hints undecorated,below,sticky,skip_taskbar,skip_pager

A new screenshot:

This is KDE/Xgl/Compiz with a Milkish sort of cgwd theme. Just enough transparency to make things interesting. Of course Compiz is best when you see it in action.

The wallpaper from Interfacelift. Such a nice wallpaper.

For the benefit of any Googlers who are looking for how to do this, and for my own benefit when I forget:

Trying to get Conky to be transparent in KDE would either cause all my icons to disappear, the entire background to turn black, or Conky itself to appear entirely black. "own_window" and "own_window_transparent" and "own_window_type" in any combination didn't matter.

The answer is to go to Control Center -> Desktop -> Behavior and check "Show icons on desktop" and "Allow programs in desktop window". I was struggling for two days trying to figure this out.

EDIT: Strangely, I sometimes have to enable / disable this option in KDE, and then restart Conky, and THEN Conky will be properly transparent. Odd.