The tool allows you to easily enable/disable various Conky modules/widgets and it also supports full themes, which is a combination of widgets. You can configure each widget alignment, size, transparency and so on, all from a GUI so if you didn't know how to configure Conky before, give Conky Manager a try.

Conky Manager is a GUI that allows you to easily manage Conky configurations. The latest version - 1.1 -, lets you choose from 7 such configurations / themes.

GNOME Shell System Monitor is a highly configurable system monitor extension for GNOME Shell (do not confuse this with the official System Monitor extension!). It can display the CPU, RAM, Swap, Network or disk usage on the top GNOME Shell bar, either as a graph or digits (or both) and you can customize the colors, position and more.

Conky Lunatico Rings is a really nice Conky configuration based on Conky Orange which displays rings for the CPU, memory, disk and network usage, in the form of gauges.

(Using the original configuration, it looks like this on my system)

Indicator-Multiload (or System Load Indicator) is an Ubuntu Application Indicator that displays the network up/down speed as well as CPU, Memory and hard disk usage on the GNOME / Unity panel using a graph, just like the old System Monitor GNOME applet.

Since we last wrote about the GNOME Shell System Monitor extension, it got support for network upload / download rates and yesterday it also got a config dialog with lots of new features. Read on!

Here's yet another very useful GNOME Shell extension which serves as a replacement for an old Gnome Panel applet: "Gnome Shell System Monitor Applet".

"Gnome Shell System Monitor" extension displays the RAM, swap and CPU usage on the Gnome Shell top bar (apparently that's how it's called although I tend to call it the 'top panel'). The values are displayed in percentages but when clicked, you can see the actual values and you can also turn off/on the items that are displayed on the top bar:

Yet another much requested AppIndicator is now available for Ubuntu 11.04: an indicator to display the network speed as well as CPU, Memory usage and more called System Load Indicator (or "Indicator Multiload").

This is a port of the original System Monitor GNOME Panel applet to appindicators and Vala. This means it has most of the features the System Monitor Applet had: display processor, memory, network, swap space, load or hard disk activity, change the colors and so on using an Ubuntu indicator..

"notifyOSD Conky" is a simple Conky setup created by BigRZA that displays the CPU usage / temperature, RAM and HDD usage as well as the network traffic.

System Monitor Indicator is a new appindicator that displays your system CPU and memory usage on the panel - be it the regular Gnome panel or the new Unity top bar.

Despot77 posted a great looking Conky Lua configuration at Gnome-Look that displays some beautiful rings for the cpu, clock, ram, swap, disk, net and also comes with an easy way to display the weather that doesn't involve you register to any website, work with API keys and so on. Another thing I like about this configuration is that it comes with various color themes and distribution logos: Fedora, Linux Mint and Ubuntu (update: the package also provides Debian and openSUSE configurations).

Here is a screenshot of my desktop - setting it up took under one minute so don't get scared about the instructions below, it's actually quite easy:

A new Conky Colors version has been released (5.0 beta 1) today which adds a beautiful new "board mode" which you can see in the screenshot in the beginning of the post. Here's another screenshot using a light (Radiance) Conky Colors theme:

Conky Colors - a script to easily configure Conky with lots of built-in options -, added some cool new features recently: cairo mode (--cairo) and a new theme: Elementary.

Conky is a free, light-weight system monitor for X, that displays any information on your desktop. You've seen it in many screenshots under various forms; take a look at these screenshots if you don't know what Conky is.

To use Conky, you must manually set it up - and that's not easy as you must manually create the configuration file and customize it yourself. But now you can do this a lot easier using ConkyWizard, a GUI written in Qt and C++ to set up Conky and customize everything visually.

Actually, I've written this post before (quite a few months ago) but then deleted it because it didn't work. In the mean time, I found out why, so I decided to post it again. I find pressing Control + Alt + Delete to open up System Monitor to be very useful, especially for Windows users who are used to it and may actually press this quite a few times before realizing it doesn't do anything or what it does in Windows. Using System Monitor, you can preview all running processes, end or kill them, see how much CPU a process is using, CPU + memory + network history, available disk space and even change how much CPU a process should use.

There are 2 ways of changing Ctrl + Alt + Delete behavior to open System Monitor: one if you are running Compiz, and one for Metacity, only to use if you are not running Compiz.

Step 1: This is actually very important: go to System > Preferences > Keyboard shortcurs and search for any command which already has Ctrl + Alt + Delete set as a shortcut and change it's shortcut. If you don't change this, it will not work! If you want to use the "Del" ("keypad .") button instead of "Delete", search for that and also make sure there's no shorcut set for it.

Once you complete step 1, we can proceed.