Introducing Conky Bubbles (osc26)

Conky is a graphical system monitoring program for Linux, for many years I have maintained it in several Linux Distributions including openSUSE. In that time I have come across a number of its limitations especially if your goal is to write a config file that will work out of the box across a wide range of machines rather than creating tailor made configs for each machine. Beyond that writing a conky config that looks really good takes significant effort and often a lot of manually adjusting the location of elements. conky-bubbles aims to address the above issues using conky's lua integration and cairo to implement a layout engine, widgets, theming and hardware auto detection where possible. In this talk I will cover the long on and off process that it has taken to get to this point and the many unexpected challenges that I have had to overcome, from licensing issues to learning how to implement font rendering and chasing down memory leaks in the interface between C++ and Lua. I also spent significant time working with existing open source projects and will talk about integrating with and using resources from them to speed up development. I will then give a overview of how to setup and use and configure conky bubbles to meet your own needs. As well as running through a few examples. Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ about this event: https://c3voc.de