Conky is a free, light-weight system monitor for X, that displays any information on your desktop. Conky is licensed under the GPL and runs on Linux and BSD.

Conky is a light-weight system monitor, which it draws the system information with text, lines and dots. conky allows customization, in fact it is a drawing block that prepare for you to configure. Put all your settings into ~/.conkyrc. You can always get some sample conkyrc at Conky Official Website.

After showing you how to install and configure conky, and then gave you the idea that you can display Twitter statuses on it, it's time for me to share to you some of the most highly-customized, unique, and awe-inspiring conky configurations.

Cairo-Dock is an animated application launch bar for the desktop, comparable to the dock in Mac OS X or Rocket Dock (for Windows). It is compatible with Compiz, but it can also run without a composite manager . Cairo-Dock can run under GNOME, KDE and XFCE.

Cairo-Dock is a system dock similar to Awn and the dock in Mac OS X. It’s not as fancy as Awn, but Cairo-Dock is very configurable and supports some slick graphical effects.

Conky is a free, light-weight system monitor for X, that displays any information on your desktop but it's quite difficult especially for beginners to set up.

To Linux newbies who have seen that geeky looking desktop system monitor but don't know what it is or how to get and install it, well it's called Conky and you too can easily have it, and you don't have to be a computer hacker to set it up.Here is a step-by-step guide on installing and configuring Conky on Ubuntu

A minimalist Conky configuration that changes color to match the Day of Ubuntu transitioning wallpaper.

gtk-desktop-info is a python tool to display various pieces of information directly on the desktop, using plugins for html rendering, with html templates and css style sheets for formatting.