Monday, October 5, 2015

Psensor Updated With Option To Display Temperature Sensors On The Panel [Ubuntu 14.04 PPA]

Psensor, a hardware temperature monitoring tool, was updated recently with an option to display the temperature on the panel (next to its AppIndicator icon), along with other improvements and bug fixes.

Psensor Hardware Monitor Tool

For those not familiar with Psensor, this is a tool which can be used to monitor the motherboard and CPU temperatures, Nvidia GPUs temperature, (for ATI/AMD it's more complicated) hard disk temperature, fans rotation speed and CPU usage.

The application comes with Ubuntu AppIndicator support (the icon turns red when the temperature reaches a certain threshold), desktop notifications as well as Unity Launcher support (it displays the highest temperature on top of the Psensor icon in the Unity Launcher). These features are all configurable - enable/disable them from the Psensor preferences.

Psensor Hardware Monitor Tool

From its preferences, you can select to show/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 (well, sort of).

The latest Psensor 1.0.1 (now updated to 1.0.2 to fix a minor bug), released recently, includes the following changes:
  • the temperature can now be displayed directly in the panel, next to the Psensor icon (this feature is currently considered experimental);
  • the indicator icons are now smaller and more consistent with the default Ubuntu themes;
  • added a setting to enable/disable launching Psensor on session startup (and with this, Psensor is no longer autostarted by default);
  • various GUI fixes;
  • fixed NVIDIA strings;
  • other bug fixes.

To get Psensor to display the temperature on the panel (next to its indicator icon), here's what you need to do: click the Psensor indicator, select "Sensor Preferences", then select the sensor(s) for which you want the temperature to be displayed on the panel and enable "Display sensor in the label (experimental)":

Psensor Hardware Monitor Tool

You can do this for as many sensor as you want, but that will clutter the Unity panel so it's best if you only select to display one sensor.

Note that it may take a few seconds after you enable this until the temperature shows up on the panel.


Ubuntu 14.04 installation and usage


Before proceeding, please note that the latest Psensor 1.0.2 is only available in a PPA for Ubuntu 14.04 for now! For older Ubuntu versions, you can get an older Psensor version from the Ubuntu repositories or from both the stable and unstable (see below, step 3) Psensor PPAs.


1. Psensors makes use of lm-sensors and hddtemp to get the temperatures, so you need to install these two packages:
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).

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. Next, you need to set up lm-sensors by running the following command:
sudo sensors-detect
And answer "yes" to everything.

To avoid a system restart, run the following command to load the modules required by the sensors:
sudo service kmod start
(if no sensors show up in Pensor, try a system restart)

4. Install Psensor

The latest Psensor 1.0.2 is available in its official Unstable PPA for Ubuntu 14.04 only for now (it will be available in the stable PPA after the new packaging is accepted into Debian).

To add the Psensor Unstable PPA and install the latest Psensor in Ubuntu 14.04, use the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jfi/psensor-unstable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install psensor

By default, the latest Psensor doesn't start automatically when you login (unless you've upgraded from an older version). If you do want it to run on startup, in its Preferences (not Sensor Preferences!), click on the Startup tab and then enable "Launch on session startup".  If you don't want the Psensor window to be displayed on startup (for instance, you only want the indicator to start automatically - you can manually open the Psensor window later on), also enable "Hide window on startup".

Other Linux distributions: check out the Psensor homepage.

For how to report a bug, see what some sensors represent and more, check out the Psensor FAQ.
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