Today, I am introducing a new simple, user-friendly, and practical tool: Distro Widget !
It is a special configuration for Conky, the system monitor that displays in the background on the desktop, compatible with GNU/Linux & BSD systems.
What’s special about it ? It integrates data from Distro Tracker & Distro Reporter ! Yes, for the first time, I’m developing a “desktop” tool linked to Distro Tracker.
After a simple installation, distro-get, a small independent and lightweight utility, is added to the /home/user/.config/conky/ directory to provide two features: downloading data (by default, the data updated every morning on my Gitlab in JSON format), and reading this data. The Conky configuration itself is located in the conky.conf file, alongside a header image for Conky. A conky.desktop file is also created in the /home/user/autostart/ directory.
For now, in addition to some system information and statistics, it randomly displays a distribution along with the date and version number of its latest release, as well as the list of distributions that have had changes in the last downloaded report.
Installation.
wget https://gitlab.com/fredericpetit/self/-/raw/main/org/bash/distro-widget/dev/standalone/distro-widget.sh --no-check-certificate && chmod +x distro-widget.sh && ./distro-widget.sh --username "$USER"
Configuration.
Daily download of remote data, for example via crontab, with the default JSON format :
0 13 * * * /home/test/.config/conky/distro-get.sh --action download --type tracker
0 13 * * * /home/test/.config/conky/distro-get.sh --action download --type reporter
Example.
Feel free to share your feedback. A Debian & Snapcraft package will be created soon.
Happy tracking !