1. Introduction

Psensor is a graphical hardware monitoring application for Linux.

It draws realtime charts and raises alerts about:

  • the temperature of the motherboard and CPU sensors (using lm-sensors).

  • the temperature of the NVidia GPUs (using XNVCtrl).

  • the temperature of the Hard Disk Drives (using hddtemp or libatasmart).

  • the rotation speed of the fans (using lm-sensors).

  • the temperature of a remote computer.

  • the cpu load.

Alerts are using Desktop Notification and a specific GTK+ status icon.

For Ubuntu users, Psensor is providing an Application Indicator which turns red under alert and a menu for quickly check all sensors.

It is possible to monitor remotely a computer:

  • start psensor-server on the remote computer.

  • start psensor using: psensor --url=http://hostname:3131.

psensor-server is a minimal Web server, a Web browser can be used to monitor the remote computer by opening the URL: http://hostname:3131.

Warning
 psensor-server does not provide any way to restrict the connection to the HTTP server, worst, no effort has been made against malicious HTTP attacks. You should make the psensor-server port available only to a network or computer you trust by using the usual network security tools of the system (for example: iptables).

2. Installation Using Distribution Packages

2.1. Debian

For Debian, the binary and source packages are available in the Wheezy, unstable and testing repositories.

Debian package information is available at: http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/psensor.html.

To do the installation:

sudo apt-get install psensor psensor-server

2.2. Ubuntu

Since Ubuntu Oneiric (11.10), psensor is available in the universe repository of Ubuntu.

To install psensor or psensor-server:

sudo apt-get install psensor
sudo apt-get install psensor-server

Or search them in the Ubuntu Software Center.

For other Ubuntu releases or user the more recent release, the easiest way is to use the dedicated PPA.

Last stable version:

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

Last development version which should not contain major bugs:

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

Daily trunk build which may contain major bugs and partialy implemented features:

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

3. Installation From Source Archive

psensor and psensor-server can be compiled and installed on any modern GNU/Linux distribution.

3.1. Compilation Prerequisites

The compilation of psensor requires:

  • make

  • gcc (or llvm)

  • lm-sensors

  • library sensors4

  • library gtk3 >=3.4

  • library gconf2

  • help2man

  • asciidoc (optional, required to produce the html version of the faq)

  • cppcheck (optional, static source checker)

  • library libnotify (optional)

  • library libappindicator (optional)

  • library libXNVCtrl (optional)

  • library json0 and curl (optional, required for remote monitoring)

  • library unity (>=v3.4.2, optional)

  • library gtop2 (optional, required for CPU usage)

  • library atasmart (optional, for disk monitoring)

The specific requirements for psensor-server:

  • library libmicrohttpd

  • library json0

For Debian 7.0:

sudo apt-get install asciidoc cppcheck gcc gettext libgtk-3-dev
libgconf2-dev libnotify-dev libsensors4-dev help2man
libcurl4-openssl-dev libjson0-dev libmicrohttpd-dev libgtop2-dev
libatasmart-dev make

For Fedora 17:

sudo yum install gcc gtk3-devel GConf2-devel lm_sensors-devel cppcheck
libatasmart-devel libcurl-devel json-c-devel libmicrohttpd-devel
help2man libnotify-devel libgtop2-devel make

For Ubuntu 12.10:

sudo apt-get install asciidoc autoconf automake autopoint
debhelper (>= 9) cppcheck gettext help2man libappindicator3-dev
libatasmart-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev libgconf2-dev libgtk-3-dev
libgtop2-dev libjson0-dev libmicrohttpd-dev libnotify-dev
libsensors4-dev libunity-dev nvidia-settings perl

3.2. Compilation and Installation Steps

  1. download the source archive from: http://wpitchoune.net/psensor/files

  2. Extract files from the source archive

  3. Compilation: ./configure;make clean all

  4. Installation: make install (require to have root permission)

  5. Start the sensor detection script: sensors-detect and follows the instructions. Reboot or activate the kernel modules which have been found.

  6. To monitor HDDs, the hddtemp daemon must be installed and running.

  7. Run: psensor

3.3. ATI/AMD GPU Support

When the OpenSource ATI driver is used, the monitoring information is available throw lm-sensors and does not require the following instructions.

When the proprietary ATI driver(Catalyst) is used, the build is requiring an additional library.

Download the ATI ADL SDK and extracts the files of the archive into a directory [dir].

Replace the step 3. of the above section by ./configure --with-libatiadl=[dir] where [dir] must be the directory where you have extracted the ATI ADL SDK. Other steps are indentical.

4. Contact

Bugs and comments can be sent to jeanfi@gmail.com.

Home page: http://wpitchoune.net/psensor