2013-05-09

HOWTO: get hardware sensors info (temperature, fan speed, voltage etc.) in Linux

(Tested in Debian Wheezy).
  1. Install the lm-sensors software package:
    # apt-get install lm-sensors
  2. Run the interactive hardware monitoring chip detection script:
    # sensors-detect
    Usually, it asks a lot of questions, and you can automatically answer 'yes' on them (but be careful: on some systems a full scan can cause some problems, e. g., a false chip detection or even a system hang):
    # yes | sensors-detect
  3. After choosing to add the needed module names automatically to the /etc/modules config file, it's good to check it for duplicate entries (and possibly other garbage).
  4. Reboot (or try to load the newly added kernel modules manually).
  5. Finally, just execute the following command to print the sensors information:
    $ sensors