Now that I’m running the BOINC client and participating in the World Community Grid project I started to get concerned that my laptop would be running a bit too hot. After a fair amount of exploration I’ve come up with what I think is a complete temperature monitoring solution.
Firstly I tried to install the lm-sensors package. Everything would appear to install fine, but it would fail to detect the sensors.
Further digging led me to find out that the ACPI Linux Kernel Module exposes information about thermal zones. The information is accessible as plain text files as part of the /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/ directory tree. But I wanted a graphical way of viewing the information.
More searching and I came across the GNOME Sensors Applet. It installed fine via the Ubuntu repositories and was able to present the temperature information in my GNOME panel at the top of the screen.
When I visited the website for the applet I discovered that the applet can read information from other sources as well. I installed the hddtemp package, via the Ubuntu repositories, and I could now see the temperature of my hard disk drive.
I also discovered that the applet could display the temperature of my NVIDIA graphics card. To get this feature working I decided to compile the applet from source code. When I originally tested the version of the applet from the Ubuntu repositories couldn’t see the NVIDIA sensor.
As an overview the steps I followed were:
- Install the nvidia-settings package from the Ubuntu repositories. For some reason when I installed the driver the necessary NVCtrl libraries and header files were not installed;
- Install the gettext package from the Ubuntu repositories;
- Download the GNOME Sensors Applet source;
- Run the configure script with the following options
./configure --prefix=/usr --with-nvidia; - Make and install the software; and
- Add the applet to my panel.
The last thing I did was configure the applet with the maximums that I could find in the /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/*/trip_points files. I also added the slowdown threshold displayed by the nvidia-settings application as the maximum for the video card.
A very successful technology exploration.
Photo of the heat sink taken by Jef Poskanzer and uploaded to Flickr.
November 15, 2008 at 8:35 am
Was this for your Mini 9 with Ubuntu? Thanks!
November 17, 2008 at 2:24 pm
Actually this post predates the purchase of my mini by almost a year.
However I did some investigations this afternoon and found that the sensors-applet package installs brilliantly on the Mini 9 and I can see temperature information.
Hope this helps.