Monitor Hardware Temperature In Ubuntu With Psensor

Psensor is a tool to monitor hardware temperature that integrates nicely with Unity by using an Unity Launcher counter which displays the enabled temperatures as well as an appindicator that you can use to take a quick look at all available hardware temperatures or cpu usage.

Psensor can monitor:

• motherboard and CPU temperatures
• the temperature of Nvidia GPUs
• experimental ATI/AMD GPUs temperature monitor (not enabled for the Ubuntu PPA as it requires compilation using libatiadlxx)
• hard disk drives temperature
• fan speed
• CPU usage

The application can also display hot temperature alerts using desktop notifications and the application indicator which turns read when a threshold is reached. The alerts are not enabled by default - to enable them, select Sensor Preferences, then select a sensor check the "Activate desktop notifications" box under "Alerts".

From its preferences, you can select to hide the Psensor window on startup so you can use it as a stand-alone indicator or to hide window decoration and use the Psensor graph as a desktop widget

A new Psensor version has been uploaded recently into the Psensor unstable PPA, which fixes many bugs (including a bug that was casing the systray and appindicator to be visible in the same time when the systray is whitelisted) and adds some new features like:

• low thresold support for alerts
• fan alert support
• added --new-instance option to allow the creation of multiple instances of Psensor
• you can now select between Celsius and Fahrenheit temperature units
• added option --use-libatasmart to use atasmart library for disk monitoring instead of hddtemp daemon
• more

Install Psensor in Ubuntu

1. Firstly you need to install lm-sensors and hddtemp; these packages are required for Psensor to be able to monitor CPU, hard disk and motherboard temperatures as well as CPU fan speed:

sudo apt-get install lm-sensors hddtemp

2. Update: for Ubuntu 14.04 and newer, skip this step as Psensor doesn't require it any more (it uses udisks2)

Set up hddtemp

To get the hddtemp daemon to run on boot, use the following command:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure hddtemp

and select "Yes" when asked if hddtemp should run at boot. Select the defaults for the other questions.

3. Set up lm-sensors:

sudo sensors-detect

And answer "yes" to everything.

You can now either restart the computer or run the following command to load the modules required by the sensors:

sudo service kmod start

4. Install Psensor

Psensor is available in the official Ubuntu repositories so to install it, click the button below:

Or run the following command in a terminal:

sudo apt-get install psensor

Psensor is also available in a stable PPA which you can use to install newer, stable Psensor versions:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jfi/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install psensor

There's also an unstable Ubuntu PPA which comes with the new features I've mentioned above and many bug fixes. Using this package, you'll get newer features faster, but you may also encounter bugs. Add the PPA and install Psensor from the unstable PPA using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jfi/psensor-unstable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install psensor

To install it in other Linux distributions, see the Psensor homepage.