Taking your hardware's temperature - Beat the Heat

With lm-sensors, you can monitor your hardware’s internal temperature to avoid overheating.

- Bruce Byfield

Hardware temperatures have long been the concern of sys-tem administrators and server farms. However, with summer and the recent record temperatures worldwide, excess heat inside a computer case has become every user’s concern. Too much heat can cause a computer to act erratically. In extreme cases, overheating can result in your computer shutting down until it cools off or, worse, cause permanent damage to sensitive components. If you’re using a laptop positioned on your bare legs, you could even suffer third-degree burns.

Author

Bruce Byfield is a computer journalist and a freelance writer and editor specializing in free and open-source software. In addition to his writing projects, he also teaches live and e-learning courses. In his spare time, Bruce writes about Northwest Coast art (http:// brucebyfield. wordpress. com). He is also co-founder of Prentice Pieces, a blog about writing and fantasy at https://prenticepieces.com/.

With so much at stake, there is a real need to monitor hardware temperatures, at least on new machines, on hotter days and during long sessions on your computer. On Linux, you have a number of utilities that will read temperature settings, but many are minimally useful or even obsolete. As a result, you not only have the heat to contend with, but also inadequate or obsolete tools as well. Fortunately, the lm-sensors (Linux monitoring sensors) [1] package can help solve this problem, although it does require some setup and the loading of kernel modules.

A Matter of Thermodynamics