Linux Prime Time

There are many reasons for why you would to want to monitor your computers temperature. One might be that you are overclocking your processor and you would like to check if its temperature is stable or not or that the conditions of the room your computer is in are hot and you want to check if your computer is fine or not. To monitor the temperature all computers these days come with sensors on the motherboard or the processor which can monitor the temperature.

Now to read the data from these sensors you need proper tools luckily on Linux the extremely powerful lm-sensors library available, only one problem lm-sensors does not have a graphical front end by default. Thats where Ksensors comes in it is basically an extremely powerful graphical front-end to lm-sensors.

Onto the installation, first we need to install lm-sensors, to do so enter the following

sudo apt-get install lm-sensors

then enter this

sudo sensors-detect

What this will do is that lm-sensors will detect what sensors your motherboard has and ask you simple questions. Once lm-sensors is setup, we will install Ksensors to do so enter the following:

sudo apt-get install ksensors

Now press the key combo Alt+F2 and in the prompted dialog enter this Ksensors. This will start up Ksensors and you will get its applet in your panel and a window similar to this:

In this case i have already a sensor but by default the window is empty. Right click the window and click on configure.

The sensors that are available no in your computer are listed on the left. Click on the one you want to see in the window shown one then make sure that in both the Panel and Dock tab visible is checked. When you select for a sensor to be visible in the panel then it is shown in the panel like so:

It is that simple. Now this is all well and good, but you may well want KSensors to start when you login. For KDE (which  what the guide is obviously aimed at), you need to add an entry into your Autostart folder. To do that, right-click an empty part of the desktop and do Create New > Link to Application. Presentation doesn’t matter, here we’re interested in the Application tab. In the Command box, type ksensors and click OK.

Open up your home folder and browse to the .kde folder (use View > Show Hidden files or type the path in). In there, go into Autostart and move that launcher we just created into that folder.

Now your KSensors tray will open up every time you log in to KDE.

Hope this helps your computers perform better

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