How to monitor your hardware's health

The Eee PC has a CPU (central processor unit) that can run at various speeds. You might want to keep an eye on what it's doing. You might also want to keep an eye on the temperature of that CPU: if it's working hard it will heat up, especially if you sit the unit on a soft surface that blocks the air inlet holes on the bottom of the case, or if you block the air outlet grill on the left side.

You have two options: Conky or GKrellm.

• Enable the community repository, if you haven't already (following these instructions)
• Install:
  • Open synaptic, scroll down to the package “conky” and mark it for installation, then apply
  • Open the console, enter the command “sudo apt-get install conky”
• Optional: Select and install alternative version. There may be different Versions of conky available in your repositories. By default, the repository configured with the highest priority (/etc/apt/preferences) will be used.
  • In synaptic, right click the package and select Properties. Then go to the Versions tab.
  • In the shell, use “apt-cache policy conky” to check available versions.
  • To tell apt to install from a the “p701” distribution, use “apt-get install conky/p701”
• You'll need to restart your machine before the changes take effect.

Source and more information, including screenshots: http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=7946

Note that in its default configuration conky is a major CPU hog. To get CPU usage down to manageable levels you need to drop the polling frequency to less than the default of once every two seconds. Right-click on each graph and select “Setup Update Interval” [sic] and for hardware-related sensors set it to 5s or even 10-15s for noncritical things like battery and memory usage. You'll have to play around a bit with the sensors that you do this for, for things like CPU usage the load isn't very high while for memory and battery status is it. If you can hit the right sensors you should see conky's CPU usage drop from 40-45% down to under 10%.

GKrellm is a system monitoring utility that can be used in Easy Mode or in Advanced Mode, or even with any of the alternative linux distributions. To install it, simply open a terminal window (Ctrl-Alt-T in Easy Mode) and type:

 sudo apt-get install gkrellm

If you get a reply saying “Couldn't find package gkrellm”, you will have to add some package repositories to your list.

You will also want to pick up the x86info plugin for displaying processor speed:

 sudo apt-get install gkrellm-x86info

There are a few others you might be interested in as well, such as the gkrellmwireless package which provides plugin for monitoring your wireless connection.

Once you've installed GKrellm, you can start it in Easy Mode from a Terminal window with “gkrellm &”. the ampersand is added so you can get your command prompt back right away, without it you won't able to use your Terminal window so long as GKrellm is runnning. But don't start GKrellm yet, because we still have work to do.

Before we can use GKrellm to monitor temperature, we have to enable a kernel module called 'thermal'. First we'll do it on a temporary basis, and then on a permanent basis so you don't have to enable it after every reboot.

For the temporary solution from a Terminal window, confirm that the 'thermal' module exists and can be loaded by typing:

 sudo modprobe thermal

If this worked, you'll get no message returned back to you. If it didn't work, you'll get an error message. Copy it and post a query in the Forum in the Xandros Linux forum - there's a thread on Custom kernel wanted with Temp sensor enabled.

Now we can go ahead with the permanent solution. We need to add 'thermal' to the list of modules to be loaded at startup:

 sudo nano /etc/modules

Add the following line after all of the others: 'thermal' (without the quotes, of course). Now we can go ahead and configure GKrellm.

Start GKrellm and edit its configuration by either pressing F1 (after clicking on GKrellm to ensure it has the focus) or by right-clicking on its title bar and selecting Edit Configuration. There's lots to play with here, but we're only interested in a couple of items.

1. Click on the little right-pointing triangle beside Builtins so it expands that section.
2. Click on Sensors, and notice that there are three listed: Temperatures, Fans, Voltages.
3. There should be a little right-pointing triangle to the left of Temperatures. Click on it to expand the list of temperature sensors.
4. You should see the following sensor listed: “thermal_zone/TZ00. Click on the Enable box to, umm, enable it.
5. Now click on the CPU item in the list of monitors. In its Options tab, click on the Enable CPU checkbox.
6. Click on the OK button to exit the configuration, and you should see the current CPU speed listed, and the CPU temperature.

N.B. If the CPU speed is not displayed, you probably need to enable the gkx86info plugin on the plugins tab of the configuration dialog.

Here's what GKrellm looks like running in Easy Mode with the AsusLauncher minimized and and an IceWM background in place (image courtesy and copyright digitalblasphemy.com). Note: just before I took the screenshot, the CPU was idling at 40 MHz.

Once you've enabled the 'thermal' module, you don't actually need GKrellm. If you're working away in a Terminal and want to check on your CPU's temperature, just type:

 cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/TZ00/temperature

and you should see something like this:

 temperature:         50 C

The reported CPU speed is inaccurate by default in all EeePCs, however it is an easy fix to get it reporting the speed accurately. In the Terminal, simply type:

 sudo modprobe -r p4-clockmod
 grep "cpu MHz" /proc/cpuinfo

and you should see:

 cpu MHz        : 630 MHz

If you then want to allow your processor to slow down while at idle, type:

 sudo cpuspeed

If you check the CPU speed once again, you may see something like this:

 cpu MHz        : 112.5 MHz

See this forum post for a quick How-To get the CPU speed increased to the real 900MHz