temperature

[Steve Haines]

Bob Nielsen wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 30, 2005 at 08:30:57PM -0800, Daniel Robitaille wrote:
> 
>>>do you want to say that mine should work too ?
>>>or that i'm a rare exception ?
>>
>>My point was that in some case these cheap motherboards work seems to
>>work fine with Ubuntu, and someone bad experience cannot be
>>generalized to everyone with the same model type.  (actually mine is
>>K7S41GX while the it seems the model quoted in the first email in this
>>thread was a K7S41; maybe the "GX" makes a difference...)
>>
>> > also, can you read the CPU temperature and if so how ?
>>
>>Actually I don't know if it can from Ubuntu;  it one of these thing I
>>never figured out how to do. The BIOS can do it, that I know since I
>>have seen temperature measurements from the BIOS setup menu; but I
>>never tried from within Ubuntu, but would love if someone would tell
>>me how to do it.
>>
> 
> 
> Supposedly one can do this with lm-sensors, but I haven't been able to
> get that to work correctly with any recent kernels.  You can also get
> voltage, temperature and fan speed data using mbmon, but the numbers
> sometimes look strange (on one of my computers it shows 201 deg C and 
> if that was true I suspect it would have failed long ago). 
> 
> 
> 
I have the temperatures, fan speeds, voltages, etc. working right now on 
Ubuntu (they also work in Mepis and Libranet). My hardware is very 
pedestrian: an Athlon K7 at 950 Mhz on an otherwise unnamed motherboard. 
The BIOS is pre 1998. The kernel is the default 2.6.8-i386.

The back end of the measuring is done by lm-sensors. Install it, and run 
"sensors-detect" in a terminal. "man sensors-detect" for more info. 
There is also a very informative website for lm-sensors. I just followed 
the dialog script and accepted the defaults. Eventually you will be 
given a choice to write the suggested module changes into /etc/modules. 
I accepted the option, rebooted, and the modules loaded fine.

There is a HUGE warning to not run sensors-detect on IBM Thinkpads, as 
it will terminally, for ever, permanently ruin the box. Interesting.

Then install gkrellm, and that will be the "front-end" for reading the 
data. Works like a charm in Gnome and KDE.A right-click on the gkrellm 
panel will get you to the configure options. The only thing unexplained 
is WHERE the three temperatures are taken from. I assume the most 
rapidly changing one is from inside the CPU, and the most stable one is 
probably the motherboard. The middle one is perhaps from the CPU socket.

If you have installed and have running the daemon from hddtemp, gkrellm 
will automatically pick up that output and give you a real-time hard 
drive temperature as well.

Two plugins that I enjoy for gkrellm are GKrellWeather and GKrellKam. I 
set the latter to show two panes of weather radar from www.weather.com. 
One is from St. Louis and shows my dad's area, and the other is all of 
South America, so I get an idea of what is headed my way in Paraguay. I 
use "Eye of Gnome" ("eog" is the command) as a reader, so a click on a 
GKrellKam tiny panel in gkrellm gives me a full screen radar map in eog 
to look at. Kind of neat. Hope this overview helps.