Here’s a small how to get LM_sensors to work with OpenSuSE 10.2.

The package comes with and built-in into OpenSuSE 10.2, so there’s no need to install it or any other libraries to get it working. And for those not in the know, the primary mission for package/application is to provide the best and most complete hardware health monitoring drivers for Linux - lets you track the temperature, voltages and fan speeds of your machine. The package is called as sensors in openSUSE.

To make your applications utilise the information gathered by  sensors we need to install the module so it is loaded when your openSUSE boots.

Installation:

1. As the package is already installed with your default openSUSE installtion, we need to configure lm_sensors module. For this execute the following as root:

# sensors-detect

When asked say “YES” to all of it’s questions. You should see at least a few tests marked with SUCCESS. If not, then probably your motherboard (chipsets responsible for monitoring) isn’t supported. At the end when it asks if you want to overwrite /etc/sysconfig/lm_sensors, answer “YES” (I have NO in the snapshot below as I

have already done so before)

2. Now we need to highlight and copy everything between those the lines “#——cut here ——”, as marked above.

3. Now open File Manager - Super User Mode - click KDE menu and type “konquerorsu“ and provide your root password, or open terminal and type the same.

4. Head to /etc/init.d/ and open with an editor file boot.local. Paste everything you copied before at the end of the file.

5. That’s it. Nex time you boot your openSUSE the sensors module will kick in automatically.

Here are few areas where you can use the sensors information to keep track of your vital low level statistics of your system.

a. Running the command sensors will give an aoutput of the following type:

b. Install a package called ksensors to keep an eye on what is interesting to you. It is a frontend for sensors.

c. I use the output from sensors for my superkaramba applet to show my CPU and case temperatures.

There are a tons of applications out there that acquire low-level outputs provided by lm_sensors (or sensors as in openSUSE).

Hope this was of some help to you guys. Enjoy.