# help: conky, lua, cairo, my head



## y2s82 (Mar 7, 2010)

I've installed conky, and my desktop became beautiful.
I've customized conky, and conky became useful.
the problem is, while the desktop became beautiful, conky remains rather ugly 

I wanted to make a background "shade", similar to that of semitransparent console windows, using the lua script that makes use of cairo:
http://conky.linux-hardcore.com/?page_id=3002

The trouble is, even though the entire conky/lua/cairo ports have been rebuilt, the conky cannot seem to execute script:


```
Conky: llua_load: /home/y2s82/.conky/draw_bg.lua:25: module 'cairo' not found:
	no field package.preload['cairo']
	no file './cairo.lua'
	no file '/usr/local/share/lua/5.1/cairo.lua'
	no file '/usr/local/share/lua/5.1/cairo/init.lua'
	no file '/usr/local/lib/lua/5.1/cairo.lua'
	no file '/usr/local/lib/lua/5.1/cairo/init.lua'
	no file '/usr/local/lib/conky/libcairo.so'
	no file './cairo.so'
	no file '/usr/local/lib/lua/5.1/cairo.so'
	no file '/usr/local/lib/lua/5.1/loadall.so'
```

So my head went boom.

Is there anyway to make it work?  conky is compiled with lua and cairo enabled via make config.  do those functions still not fully functional?  is there something i could do to work around it?


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## y2s82 (Mar 25, 2010)

Can anyone at least tell me if cairo-lua bindings work in their conky setup?


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## digital-freak (Jun 28, 2010)

Hi! I found a workaround to fix this problem.
When installing the port, some libraries are not installed (ie. libcairo.a, libcairo.so@, libimlib2.a, libimlib2.so@, libcairo.la*, libcairo.so.0*, libimlib2.la*, libimlib2.so.0) to /usr/local/lib/conky/
To fix it just make a few little steps:

```
1. # cd /usr/ports/sysutils/conky/work/conky-1.7.2/lua/
 2. # make clean
 3. # make
 4. # make install
```
PS. Sorry for my English


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## paulfrottawa (Feb 5, 2012)

this post helped me to get eclipse to start a conky script with "require cairo" in the *.lua file.


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## AASoft (May 23, 2013)

While I do realize this is an old thread, I think this may still be beneficial. I arrived at the conclusion below by running into the same issue while building Conky 1.9.0 from source on a Linux machine, so I believe the conditions are similar enough.

The Conky build process (at least for the 1.9.0 version of Conky) requires textproc/docbook2X to build the documentation. If you do not have it - it skips the doc build and goes on. But on install, it barfs because it cannot find the docs, and thus does not even get to installing from the lua directory. That's why the above suggestion by @digital-freak works; but it is also a good idea to install textproc/docbook2X to build the docs too, to be on the safe side, as I'm not sure what else gets missed besides the LUA libraries.


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