Hardware Monitoring with GKrellM

by Re Alvarez — last modified Apr 16, 2008 10:15 AM

— filed under: Post-Install Solutions

GKrellM is a single process stack of system monitors which supports applying themes to match its appearance to your window manager, Gtk, or any other theme. You can monitor things like hardware temperature, wifi signal strength, mailbox, weather, moon calendar, sun clock, RAM usage, hard disk I/O, etc., etc. using GKrellM

Applicable to Fedora Versions

Fedora 8+ (Previous releases not tested but may work)

Requirements

gkrellm
lm_sensors
hddtemp
gkrellm-hddtemp (optional, not required if hddtemp is installed)
gkrellm themes (optional)

Doing the work

Open the terminal and login as root.

Install the required packages.

yum install gkrellm hddtemp gkrellm-hddtemp lm_sensors

After installation is complete, run the following command, it will ask you some questions about probing hardware, usually the answer is "YES"
```
sensors-detect
```
It will ask you if you want to write data to /etc/sysconfig/lm_sensors, respond YES.

Now run the following command and your output should be similar.

[user@localhost]$ sensors
coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Core 0:      +45°C  (high =  +100°C)

coretemp-isa-0001
Adapter: ISA adapter
Core 1:      +46°C  (high =  +100°C)

If everything without errors, its time now to fire up gkrellm. There should be a menu icon created under Applications->System Tools. If not just type 'gkrellm' (without quotes) in a terminal and hit enter.
Now right click on gkrellm and choose Configuration goto Builtins->Sensors and select all the check boxes you see. Here's a screenshot.

If you have NVIDIA GPU, its temperature will also be shown.
You can download additional gkrellm themes tarball here.
http://www.muhri.net/gkrellm/GKrellM-Skins.tar.gz
There are a lot of plugins available in Fedora but not installed by default. You can check them out yourself. Run the following command to view a list of available plugins.
```
yum search gkrellm
```