This describes my experiances with lmsensors, in particular installing it under Debian Woody, on a Gigabyte 7VTXH
LM Sensors is a package that lets you get access to your motherboard's voltage, temperature and fan speed monitoring. Almost all motherboards since the P-II era have had this built on.
LM Sensors are very dependent on your:
This will require you to do nasty things to your machine, such as compile kernels, and possibly require you to get out a screwdriver to open up your machine to look at chips on the motherboard ! Not for the faint hearted !
I'm going to go over how I got it going on my motherboard, my kernel, and with Debian Woody. Add your experiances if they are different.
There are a number of steps to go through to get it going.
Get your kernel compiled with i2c enabled
Install the debian packages for lm-sensors
Build the kernel modules for the sensors and i2c busses
Read /usr/share/doc/lm-sensors-kernel if you use kernel-package
Figure out what sensors you have, load the correct modules.
For my Gigabyte board, I had to Google for answers, it turns out that sensors-detect found a LM78 chip on my board. That is completly wrong, the final list of modules I had to use to make it work were:
Configure /etc/sensors.conf to work out correct values and set error margins
Look for a line that starts chip "<my sensor chip>-" eg, for my machine I looked for chip "it87-"
AFTER YOU EDIT /etc/sensors.conf AND EVERY TIME YOU BOOT, RUN sensors -s
This sets up the set fields, without it, you max, min and alarm values will not be set in the driver.
3 pages link to MotherboardMonitoring: