Conky

Conky is a free, light-weight system monitor for X, that displays any information on your desktop.

• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SettingUpConky
• https://github.com/zenzire/conkyrc (this one works). Check for the WOEID for your city used in the Yahoo weather API.
• http://www.ifxgroup.net/conky.htm
• http://www.tomshardware.com/faq/id-1882395/write-conky-config-file.html Explain conkyrc file

Step 1. Install conky-all package

Step 2. create ~/.conkyrc file. This file can be downloaded from web.

Step 3. Run it: $ conky. If we want to run a specific configuration file, use conky -c CONKYRCFILE

Step 4. If you want to stop Conky: $ killall conky

Note that conky works automatically on Ubuntu's Unity.

For Lubuntu (tested on 14.04), the Conky's transparent function does not work at first. But This conkyrc works on Lubuntu desktop (mainly, tranparent function). To deal with the autostart, follow the suggestion from askubuntu.com. That is, go to ~/.config/autostart folder, create or copy+paste the file called conky.desktop with a content like

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=sh "/home/brb/.conky/conky-startup.sh"
Hidden=false
NoDisplay=false
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
Name[en_IN]=Conky
Name=Conky
Comment[en_IN]=
Comment=

and

brb@brb-VirtualBox:~$ cat .conky/conky-startup.sh 
conky &
exit 0
brb@brb-VirtualBox:~$ ls -l .conky/conky-startup.sh 
-rw-rw-r-- 1 brb brb 37 Aug 30 20:17 .conky/conky-startup.sh

Another way to configure conky is to install conky-manager. See this and project website page. But it seems it does not work well with desktop wallpaper.