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 system monitor for X originally based on the torsmo code. Since it’s original conception, Conky has changed a fair bit from it’s predecessor.
Conky can display just about anything, either on your root desktop or in it’s own window. Conky has many built-in objects, as well as the ability to execute programs and scripts, then display the output from stdout.