Fixing Conky & Conky-Manager post-Lua_5.4.0 upgrade

Configs, Scripts, Tutorials & Tips
#1

Searching this forum leads me to suspect that not many ArchLabbers use Conky OR no ArchLabbers had any hassles wrt the breakage that happened a few months ago. I offer this in hope that it might somehow assist some future readers.

Disclaimer: I claim no credit at all for this – all the smarts belong to others, whose clever work i have simply purloined.

My short-term workaround of several months had been to downgrade lua back to 5.3.5 … with that step all my Conky configs remained fine & dandy, thus all their Conkies still work. Like Nixers globally, the lua update initially broke all my Conkies.

However by definition holding an important package back indefinitely is unviable & hazardous, for a rolling distro. Yesterday i invested the hours necessary to research the problem, test the solution in my Arch VM, then deploy it for real in my Arch SSD. Shortly i hope to also deploy it in my other Archie VMs including both ArchLabs ones.

This breakage applied to Nixers who run the “traditional” Conky, & to those like me who use Conky-Manager for convenience.

Important References:

Steps:

  1. Remove the hold on lua in /etc/pacman.conf, ie, edit IgnorePkg = lua back to IgnorePkg = .
  2. Re-upgrade lua from 5.3.5-3 → 5.4.0-2.
  3. Uninstall Arch Community repo’s Conky-Manager 2.4-4.
  4. Install AUR packages conky-cairo-no-nvidia [atm 1.11.5-2] [or use the nvidia alternative if necessary] & conky-manager2-git [atm 2.7-2]. If they need to remove existing Community repo variants, let them.
  5. Download script conky/convert.lua at main · brndnmtthws/conky · GitHub, make it executable [chmod +x convert.lua], then run it against your configs. Usage: convert.lua old_conkyrc [new_conkyrc].
  6. Launch conky-manager2, start each of the converted Conkies.
  7. Enjoy.
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#2

I use conky but not with lua. But thanks for the links.

This is the extent of my conky usage lately:

2020-10-13-@19-05-16-scrot

1 Like
#3

Thx for sharing @anon39737049

1 Like