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Introduction

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You will always know the time with this styleful Nixie Tube Clock on your Linux desktop.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Features
• Installation
• Configuration
• Release Notes
• Copyright and License

Features

• Displays time in hours, minutes and seconds.
• Each second is accompanied by a nostalgic transition of the changed digits.
• Conifgurable size and position on screen.

Installation

Requirements

To use Unixie-Clock, you need:

• A Linux operating system.
• The latest release of Conky.

Installation Procedure

Step 1 - Install Conky

Install Conky (conky-all package) using a package manager on your Linux OS or using the latest version from the Conky website.

Step 2 - Download and Extract Unixie-Clock

• Go to the Releases page to download the source code of the latest Unixie-Clock release.
• On the Releases page, in the Assets section, click on the Source code (tar.gz) link to download the sources.
• Save the tar.gz file with the sources on your system.
• Create a folder .conky/unixie_clock in your home directory.
• Extract all contents of main Unixie-Clock-[version x.y.z] folder in the tar.gz file to the .conky/unixie_clock folder in the home directory of your system.

Step 3 - Prepare for first run

• Open the ~/.conky/unixie_clock directory.
• Open the file unixie_clock.conky in that directory and replace the occurences of _your_user_home_dir_name_ with your user home directory name.

lua_load = /home/'_your_user_home_dir_name_/.conky/unixie_clock/unixie_clock.lua',
lua_startup_hook = /home/'conky_config _your_user_home_dir_name_/.conky/unixie_clock/ 100',

should be replaced with the code below (in this example the user home directory name is cthru)

lua_load = '/home/cthru/.conky/unixie_clock/unixie_clock.lua',
lua_startup_hook = '/home/cthru/.conky/unixie_clock/ 100',

Step 4 - First run

• Open a Terminal window.
• Change the current directory.

cd ~/.conky/unixie_clock

• Start uNixieClock using the command below. Replace your_user_home_dir_name with your user home directory name.

conky -c /home/your_user_home_dir_name/.conky/unixie_clock/unixie_clock.conky

Step 5 (optional) - Autostart

• Open the autostart_unixie_clock.sh with a text editor and change the second line to your home directory.

   #!/bin/sh
   MY_HOME=/home/_your_user_home_dir_name_

  Example: for a user that is called cthru, change the second line as follows:

   #!/bin/sh
   MY_HOME=/home/cthru

• Add the autostart_unixie_clock.sh script to the Startup Applications of your linux OS. You can do this via the user interface.
  Alternatively, you can create a unixie_clock.desktop file in the ~/.config/autostart folder.
  You can use the example unixie_clock.desktop file provided, but you need to edit the file as follows.

  • Replace the text _your_user_home_dir_name_ from the line below with your user home directory name.

     Exec=/home/_your_user_home_dir_name_/.conky/unixie_clock/autostart_unixie_clock.sh
    

  • You may need to add execution rights to the autostart_unixie_clock.sh file

    chmod +x autostart_unixie_clock.sh

  • Copy the file.

    cd ~/.conky/unixie_clock
    cp unixie_clock.desktop ~/.config/autostart/unixie_clock.desktop

Configuration

Position and Scale

You can change the display position and scale of the Unixie-Clock by altering the following settings in the unixie_clock.conky file0.

Position

To change the position of the clock on screen, change the values of the following lines:

alignment = 'top_middle',
gap_x = 10,
gap_y = 10,

For more information on these settings, please refer to the Conky manual.

Scale

To change the scale of the clock, look for the following line:

lua_startup_hook = 'conky_config /home_your_user_home_dir_name_/.conky/unixie_clock/ 100',

The 100 at the end of the line represents the scale in percent, 100 being the normal full scale.

E.g. if you wish to display the clock at half scale, use:

lua_startup_hook = 'conky_config /home_your_user_home_dir_name_/.conky/unixie_clock/ 50',

Release Notes

For a full changelog of all versions, please look in CHANGELOG.md.

Copyright and License

Copyright (c) 2023 Christoph Vanthuyne

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Read the full license information here.

If you're more into a TL;DR approach, start here.