Most PC's built since late 1997 come with a hardware health monitoring chip. This chip may be accessed via the ISA bus or the SMBus, depending on the motherboard. The lm_sensors package includes a collection of modules for general SMBus access and hardware monitoring. '/usr/sbin/sensors-detect' detects the sensor chip as well as suggest what module to load and modifies the /etc/modules too. I have in my /etc/modules

# Generated by sensors-detect on Fri Jan 7 17:27:19 2006
# I2C adapter drivers
i2c-viapro
i2c-isa
# I2C chip drivers
eeprom
w83781d
w83627hf

Reboot the machine after modification of /etc/modules. Now 'sensors' command should show the information by asking the sensor chip (LM78 or LM80 hopefully)


GKrellM

xsensors

xsensors is a simple GTK based front-end of sensors.