Panel hardware sensors in Ubuntu Unity for Oneiric 11.10

Well, that was a quick Google search. I lamented the lack of a sensor indicator for the Ubuntu Unity panel in this post. After finally entering the right search criteria in Google, I found Alex Murray’s excellent Hardware Sensors Indicator for Unity.

The following assumes that you installed lmsensors from the repositories and ran sensors in the terminal.

The first step is to install the PPA according to the instructions at the link above. After installing the PPA and refreshing your package list with these lines in the terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:alexmurray/indicator-sensors
sudo apt-get update

install the indicator in Synaptic:

or from the terminal. You can then run the indicator from the Dash or Lens or whatever:

Upon execution, the indicator will appear on the panel, but will say something like “no sensors” until you select the sensors that you wish to display. Go to the indicator’s Preferences”

Just check the sensor which you wish to monitor from the indicator. Only one will display directly on the panel, the rest will display when you click on the indicator.

You can set limits for any sensors that you desire, including fans unlike psensor. Here I set the upper limit for CPU core 3′s temperature:

After you’ve selected the sensors that you wish to monitor, close out the preference window. Here’s how it looks on my panel:

Clicking on the displayed sensor readout access all the sensors that you checked above:

The dot appears next to the sensor value that currently displays on the panel. To choose a different sensor to display, simply click the desired sensor in the list. Simple and very effective.

Many thanks to Alex Murray for his excellent work!

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