NAME¶
I8kmon - Monitor the cpu temperature and fan status on Dell laptops
SYNTAX¶
i8kmon [
<options>]
DESCRIPTION¶
The i8kmon daemon can be used to monitor the cpu temperature and fan status on
Dell laptops. The program can be run in background as daemon or under X as an
applet which can be swallowed in the gnome panel.
By default the program monitors the cpu temperature but doesn't do any automatic
controls of the fan status accordingly to user-defined temperature thresholds
because this may not be needed if your laptop does already a good job with
fans control. The automatic control can be enabled manually with the
--auto option.
The automatic fan control can also be turned on in the control popup menu which
is invoked by clicking with the left mouse button on the temperature label.
The control menu has three items: Auto, which controls the automatic fan
control, Verbose, which prints status on stdout, and Suspend, which closes the
/proc/i8kfan file and suspends the daemon to allow unloading the kernel
module.
The user interface reports the current cpu temperature in the top box and in the
two lower buttons the status of the fans. On systems wiht only one fan the
interface shows only one fan button. If a button's background becomes red it
means that the corresponding fan has a rotation speed lower than the minimum
expected speed and is probably stuck. In this case proding it with a bent
paper clip can often cause it to become unstuck.
The fan buttons can also be used to manually control the fan speeds. Clicking on
a fan button with the left mouse button will cycle the selected fan between
low speed, high speed and off. Clicking with the middle button will set the
fan to high speed and clicking with the right button will switch the fan off.
Note however that both the BIOS and the daemon have their own idea of what the
fan speed should be and can sometimes try to override the manual settings.
OPTIONS¶
The program accepts the following command-line options:
- -a, --auto
- Monitor cpu temperature and fan status and control automatically the
fans.
- -na, --noauto
- Monitor cpu temperature and fan status but don't control automatically the
fans. This is the default setting.
- -d, --daemon
- Run the program in daemon mode, i.e. without the user interface.
- -nd, --nodaemon
- Don't run the program in daemon mode, i.e. open the user interface. This
is the default setting.
- -nc, --nouserconfig
- Don't attempt to source the ~/.i8kmon configfile, only
/etc/i8kmon.conf.
- -v, --verbose
- Report hardware status and program actions on stdout.
- -g, --geometry <geometry>
- Specifies the geometry of the applet window. Geometry should be 24x24,
36x36 or 48x48 to fit the size of the gnome panel.
- -t, --timeout <seconds>
- Specifies the interval at which the daemon checks the hardware status.
Useful values are in the range of 1-5 seconds. Default is 2 seconds.
- -u, --unit C|F
- Specifies the temperature display unit. Default is C (Celsius). This
option affects only the value shown in the applet. All other temperature
values are always in Celsius.
CONFIGURATION¶
The program has builtin defaults and temperature thresholds but users can
specify their own settings in configuration files /etc/default/i8kmon and
~/.i8kmon. The daemon defines 4 states with different fan speeds ({0 0}, {1
0}, {1 1}, {2 2}) and for each state are defined the temperature thresholds
which cause the switching to a higher or lower state. Furthermore each state
can have different thresholds for operation on ac power or battery. For
example the following configuration:
- set config(0) {{0 0} "-"1 60 "-"1 65}
set config(1) {{1 0} 50 70 55 75}
set config(2) {{1 1} 60 80 65 85}
set config(3) {{2 2} 70 128 75 128}
defines state 0 with both fans off, high threshold of 60 degrees (65 on battery)
and low threshold "-"1, which is actually never reached since 0 is
the lowest state. When the high threshold is reached the program switches to
state 1 (left low, right off) which has a high threshold of 70 degrees and a
low threshold of 50 degrees. If the temperature drops below 50 the program
will switch back to state 0, if it rises above 70 it will enter state 2, and
so on. For better operation the temperature ranges should be overlapping with
an hysteresis of at least 10 degrees, i.e. 1={50 70},2={60 80} is better than
1={50 70},2={70 80}. It must be rembered that the low threshold of state 0
must be "-"1 and the high threshold of state 3 must be 128.
If your laptop has only one fan you should specify a '-' instead of the fan
speed of the missing fan, for example:
- set config(2) {{1 -} 60 80 65 85}
This program can be used by normal users as Gnome panel applet or started as
daemon by an init script. Under Debian GNU/Linux it is possible to start the
daemon automatically by creating an /etc/default/i8kmon configfile containing
the line "set config(daemon) 1". Note the the /etc/default/i8kmon
configfile is not installed by the i8kutils package because the program is
designed to be run by normal users. If you want to use it as daemon you must
create the config file yourself. In this case, the
--nouserconfig
option can sometimes also help by limiting it to sourcing /etc/i8kmon.conf
(and not ~/.i8kmon).
FILES¶
/proc/i8k
/etc/default/i8kmon
/$HOME/.i8kmon
AUTHORS¶
Massimo Dal Zotto <dz@debian.org>
COPYRIGHT¶
i8kmon and all the i8kutils programs , scripts and other files are distributed
under the GNU General Public License (GPL). On Debian GNU/Linux systems, the
complete text of the GNU General Public License can be found in
`/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL'.
BUGS¶
On some Linux distributions i8kmon exits with an error like this:
- can't find package Tk
while executing
"package require Tk"
This is not a bug of i8kmon. It means that Tcl/Tk files are not installed
correctly on your system and the Tk library can't be dynamically loaded from
Tcl as it should be. In this case you can run i8kmon with the command:
- wish /usr/bin/i8kmon -- [options...]
SEE ALSO¶
i8kctl(1),
i8kbuttons(1)