March 9, 2016

What The Heck Happened To Conky? (I'm rolling back to 1.9)

Conky is a stalwart on my desktops.  All my system info is a glance away in that great little monitoring tool.

However, Conky 1.10 is extremely buggy and has made incompatible changes to it's config syntax since the 1.9 release.

The changes from conky 1.9->1.10 made for an incompatible disaster and conky is now totally borked in the current Ubuntu 16.04 repos. Bugs have been reported... but, while maintainers and devs figure out issues, I need my old conky back!

So I just reverted to the old `conky-std` 1.9.0 in Ubuntu 16.04, and I'm back in business for now.


Here is how I did it:

First, let's see which conky version is in installed on my 16.04 (Xenial) machine:

$ conky -v | head -n 1 | cut -d" " -f 2
1.10.1

so, I removed this borked conky and purged it's configurations and leftover dependencies:

$ sudo apt-get remove --purge conky-std && sudo apt-get autoremove

I wanted conky version 1.9, which is not in the Ubuntu Xenial repos.  So I snagged the package that shipped with Trusty:

$ wget http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/c/conky/conky-std_1.9.0-4_amd64.deb

once I had the .deb package downloaded, I installed it with `gdebi` rather `dpkg` so it would also install the necessary dependencies:

$ sudo gdebi conky-std_1.9.0-4_amd64.deb

we should now be back in business.  Let's check the version that is installed:

$ conky -v | head -n 1 | cut -d" " -f 2
1.9.0

score!

One final task is pin the package at the 1.9.0 version so future package updates don't revert us back up to the bad version:

$ sudo apt-mark hold conky-std

done!

I'm back running conky 1.9 like a boss for now.  I hope the upstream situation gets sorted soon.



TLDR:

$ sudo apt-get remove --purge conky-std && sudo apt-get autoremove
$ wget http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/c/conky/conky-std_1.9.0-4_amd64.deb
$ sudo gdebi conky-std_1.9.0-4_amd64.deb
$ sudo apt-mark hold conky-std


happy hacking.