It may seem like a simple thing that should be included in the Ubuntu operating system, but in fact Ubuntu doesn’t come with a way to monitor temperatures, and if you’re like me, you always want to have the availability of a temperature monitor at your fingertips. I have a couple of Ubuntu systems, one being a higher performance gaming tower (Yes even on Ubuntu!) and the other being my terrible laptop that has had a history of overheating. It’s easy to see why a temperature monitor would be could in these cases and while Ubuntu doesn’t come with a monitor out of the box, it definately has the tools to create one, so let’s get into it.

Psensor Psensor is the tool we will be installing onto the ubuntu machine for monitoring the temperature as it is capable of many different actions including:

  • Temperature of the motherboard, CPU, GPU, and HDD’s.
  • CPU fan speed.
  • Alarm setting capabilities
  • Graphical Representation of temperatures graphs and text.

There are a list of commands that need to be run before installing Psensor.

sudo apt install lm-sensors hddtemp

This will install a command line utility for hardware monitoring and an aditional program to monitor hard disk temperature. After, you will need to detect the hardware sensors of your laptop or computer.

sudo sensor-detect

Then, for good measure, run this simple command to ensure it worked.

sensors

After ensuring that you get an output showing your cores, temperatures and such, there’s only one thing left to do and that’s to install the actual Psensors program.

sudo apt install psensors

It’s a pretty simple execution of commands that ultimately leads to a very important tool. You can even go a step further and set up alarms to detect when the temperature goes above an unwanted temperature.