Gnome Sensors: safe for older Thinkpads?

[sutekh]

Hello, my first post:

I´m looking for a Gnome panel applet to monitor acpi-temperatures on a Thinkpad 600x. I´d use Gnome Sensors, but it supports lm_sensors, and ThinkWiki recommends to stay away from all lm_sensors-related software. So i´m a bit scared...

Did somebody try Gnome Sensors on a Thinkpad 600? Is it safe?

[christopher_wolf]

Welcome to the Thinkpads.com Forums.

Well, on the latest kernels, there should be a protection scheme that, if it senses you have a Thinkpad (particular an older Thinkpad), it will not use lm_sensors even though the applet support it. I wouldn't rely on that however. Why not just use something that isn't lm_sensor based?

[sutekh]

Hello, thanks for your reply.

The only applet without any lm_sensors-support seems to be the IBM ACPI applet from here. Unfortunately, i couldn´t get it to compile, due to dependency conflicts that i am completely unable to solve .

I ask myself wether it is too risky to try Gnome Sensors, which comes nicely packaged for the major distributions. It supports even IBM-acpi. I removed lm_sensors from my system, so only Gnome Sensors itself could eventually do some damage. Maybe i´m too cautious, but i would feel still easier, if somebody had tried that before.

[toothandnail]

I´m looking for a Gnome panel applet to monitor acpi-temperatures on a Thinkpad 600x. I´d use Gnome Sensors, but it supports lm_sensors, and ThinkWiki recommends to stay away from all lm_sensors-related software. So i´m a bit scared...

Don't know about the Gnome panel applet, and I've always been very wary of anything that uses lm_sensors. However, I'm using Conky (http://conky.sourceforge.net/) under Zenwalk 3.0 on a T23. All that I needed to do was to ensure that the IBM_ACPI kernel module was enabled and loaded. Works well for monitoring the CPU temprature. The keyword in use is "ibm_temps 0" (there are 3 different temprature readouts provided, can't recall what the other two are.

Did somebody try Gnome Sensors on a Thinkpad 600? Is it safe?

No. I would imagine the only problem using Conky would be whether the 600 fully supports ACPI. I'm also running a 2.6.18 kernel, though Conky also reported CPU temprature running the orignal 2.6.17.11 kernel.

paul

[sutekh]

Problem solved .

I had a conversation with the developer of Gnome Sensors here, and after that i tried. My Thinkpad and me are well. However, i had to compile from source, since the Fedora package did´t work without lm_sensors installed.

@toothandnail: Conky looks nice (link), but it can´t beat a panel applet. The 600x supports acpi with the kernel parameter acpi=noirq.