NAME
I8kmon - Monitor the cpu temperature and fan status on Dell Inspiron
laptops
SYNTAX
i8kmon [<options>]
DESCRIPTION
The i8kmon daemon can be used to monitor the cpu temperature and fan
status on Dell Inspiron 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.
-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 (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)