Acabei de instalar o conky no meu Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, mas ele aparece ... no terminal (e somente nele):
$ conky
Uptime: 0h 3m 35s
Frequency (in MHz): 800
Frequency (in GHz): 0.80
RAM Usage: 740MiB/3.76GiB - 19% ##________
Swap Usage: 0B/3.72Gi...
01.11.2012 / 18:02