Saturday, September 12, 2015

How to Monitor System Temperature in Linux – GUI Based Temperature Monitoring Tool


psensor
Short Bytes: Psensor is a graphical hardware temperature monitor for Linux. It is a GTK+ application for monitoring hardware sensors, including temperatures and fan speeds.
do you every wanted to know – what is the temperature of your PC or laptop when it becomes so hot and throws out warm air? There any many reasons for overheating and it can happen without any hardware fault, due to various software issues e.g. buggy graphics card driver, misconfigured fan control program, malfunctioning CPU frequency scaling daemon, etc. Another quite common cause for overheating is dust, dirt and debris clogging the cooling system (fan, heat sink and ventilation openings).
Though, in most cases, you are not supposed to be worried about the temperature of your computer. Barring manufacturing defects, hardware is designed so that its temperature does not exceed maximum operating temperature. But it is always better if you get to know what’s going on inside your system and you can set alerts.
Sometimes overheating may become serious enough to cause permanent damage on your hardware. You should always watch out for any overheating issue in your system. And even better, have temperature monitoring system in place, so that you will be alerted if system temperature suddenly goes up. One such tool is which comes with various Linux distro is Psensor.
Psensor is a GTK+ application for monitoring hardware sensors, including temperatures and fan speeds. It displays a curve for each sensor, alerts user using Desktop Notification and Application Indicator when a temperature is too high. Psensor is designed to be simple and easy to use. The CPU and memory consumption are not significant.
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With Psensor in place you can monitor –
  • the temperature of the motherboard and CPU sensors (using lm-sensors).
  • the temperature of the NVidia GPUs (using XNVCtrl).
  • the temperature of the Hard Disk Drives (using hddtemp).
  • the rotation speed of the fans (using lm-sensors).
  • the sensors of a remote computer (using psensor-server).

How to install Psensor in Linux?

Psensor should compile on any modern distribution including GTK+ v3 and lm-sensors which are quite common. For Linux Distribution still stuck on GTK+ v2, the old 0.6.x releases of Psensor can be used.
Binary packages of Psensor are available for few Linux distributions:
You can follow below steps to install Psensor in ubuntu 14.10 –
1. First step is to install dependencies:
On Debian/Ubuntu/Mint
On RedHat/CentOS/Fedora
2. Install Psensor using following commands:
On Debian/Ubuntu/Mint
On RedHat/CentOS/Fedora
Unfortunately, on RedHat like systems, Psensor isn’t available from the default system repository, and you need to compile it from source as shown below.
Next, download the most recent stable Psensor (i.e version 1.1.3) source tarball and compile it using following commands.
3. Then, starts the detection of your hardware sensors:
4. Verify that it works:
It should display something like:
5. Run Psensor, from the desktop Application Menu to get the graphical view:
psensor-preferences
Configuring Psensor is very simple you can go to Menu PsensorPreferences. And from here, you can have options for Interface related customization, Temperature Unit, Sensor table Position, Launch/Hide at Startup and Restore Window Position and Size, Foreground/Background Color, Monitoring Duration, Update Interval etc.
With inputs from: http://wpitchoune.net/blog/psensor/
We will be covering more on how you can use Psensor-server and monitor temperature of a remote server and build you own monitoring tools. Stay tuned!

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