Gmail+Weather+Beauty right on your Ubuntu desktop

[Update:After being hit severely by ‘Digg Effect’ when this post made to the front page this morning, this site is back again. Thank you for your patience, Diggs (Buries) and Comments folks! Digg on!]

Ever wished that you had new mails notifications right on your desktop? Ever wished you knew the weather info right on your desktop? Ever wished you had your hardware information right on your desktop? Ever wished your desktop was productive and beautiful at the same time? Ever wished you didn’t have to use Mac4Lin theme to hide the ‘ugliness’ of Ubuntu’s native appearance? Ever wished you had a desktop that looked as beautiful as mine? Let’s fulfil your wish:

I have already talked about how to make your Ubuntu desktop look beautiful and productive. This time I will focus mostly on Conky. Conky is a lightweight system monitor for X. Not only monitoring system, with a little bit of scripting, it can be useful to know your new mails, weather info etc.

Here I’ve attached all the required files, attached my Conky configuration file and explained how to make your desktop look similar to mine.

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[Updated]

1. Read my previous post about AWN and Gnome-Do.
2. Install Conky:
   $ sudo apt-get install conky
3. Download this file and save in your home directory(Right-click, Save Link As…save the file as .conkyrc)
4. Make a directory scripts in your home directory. Download these scripts, extract and copy them inside the directory you just created.
5. Download all these fonts, extract and copy them inside .fonts directory in your home directory. If you don’t have the .fonts directory, you need to create it. You might need to have administrative privileges to create this directory.
6. Open .conkyrc file. Look for this line:
   ${execpi 300 python ~/scripts/gmail_parser.py yourgmailusername yourgmailpassword 3}
7. Replace yourgmailusernamewith your username and yourgmailpassword with Gmail password. You might also need to install feedparser (thanks Onno and Neil for bringing this to my attention)
   $ sudo apt-get install python-feedparser
8. To monitor your hard disk and CPU temperature install lm-sensors and hddtemp
9. $sudo apt-get install hddtemp
$sudo apt-get install lm-sensors
10. Now you need to know the location id for your location for weather info. Head to http://weather.yahoo.com. Enter city or zip code for your location and click go. Copy the location ID from the adress bar. For examples the location id for Geneva, Switzerland is SZXX0013, for Kathmandu, Nepal is NPXX0003
11. Open pogodynka.sh file look for this line kod=USID0025. Replace USID0025 with the location ID you got from step 10 above
12. If you want the temperature in Celsius instead of Farenheit, find the following line:
    w3m -dump http://weather.yahoo.com/forecast/"$kod".html | grep -A21 "Current" | sed 's/DEG/°/g' > $plik
    Replace it with:
    w3m -dump http://weather.yahoo.com/forecast/"$kod"_c.html | grep -A21 "Current" | sed 's/DEG/°/g' > $plik
13. Create a new empty file in your home directory. Name it weather. Leave the file as it is; do nothing with the file.
14. Bring Run Applicationdialog box (Alt+F2) type conky to launch it
15. If everything goes right, your desktop should be looking much ‘cooler’

More info:

• My wallpaper, The Farm House, is from http://interfacelift.com/wallpaper_beta/details/1545/the_farmhouse.html
• Emerald Theme is Scaled_Black_Mod from gnome-look.org
• More variables for conky
• Settings variables for conky

[If you want to share your desktop and want me to show the best looking desktops on my blog, shoot an email to admin[at]quicktweaks[dot]com along with the screenshot of your desktop and the conky file (if you wish). If you decide to send your conky file, don’t forget to delete your gmail username and password. Sharing is learning!]

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