What's a good program that will monitor my CPU and fans under Linux and give a human-readable output? I use KDE, though I see, like, Heatload that works for Gnome. I'm looking for something similar for KDE. I would also like to throttle the speed of the fans & the processor if possible.

GKrellm for monitoring CPU, FAN, HDD, SWAP, and RAM

http://www.superkaramba.com also ties in very nicely and is often used within KDE instead of gKrellM

There's also a Gdesklet, Ksensors and Ksysguard (for KDE), but Gkrellm beats them all !!!

Thanks. I've tried a couple I found on freshmeat, but they didn't work (one told me that /dev/acpi, or something to that effect, wasn't there, though acpid seems to work).

yeah setting the things up can be a pain

For temp and fan speed another option would be mbmon.

also you can check your CPU fan speed and temp int he BIOS

you need a package called lm-sensors

I think I have lm-sensors installed, but I can check. ...as far as why I want the program, I want somewhere I can check on the cpu and system temps as well as the fan speeds when away from the POST, as in "That Matrix screensaver raises my CPU temp how much? ...or how heavy is UT2003?". I get nothing useful by running the program, then immediately rebooting to BIOS, everything has a chance to cool off. acpid obviously can read the CPU temp, as it raises up, I can hear my fans kick up, and as I near over-temp, the kernel starts posting messages that the CPU's too hot (shows CPU overtemp, using modulated clock signal).

...as a matter of fact, I think that K-Sensors depended on lm-sensors, but it didn't work either.

have you OverClocked you CPU at all???

You need to setup lm_sensors to work.
It needs a startup script and to know which sensors to use and how.
Don't worry, it's just a matter of answering YES/No during the setup.

Fire up an xterm/konsole and get root.

Just answer Yes to all questions sid to be safe. The app tells you what tests can be dangerous, but after using them for years I haven't got any troubles with the 'dangerous' tests.

At the end of the config it will display some lines of code, in some systems the script is able to do the rest for itself, but on some others you should copy and paste this text into your /etc/modules or /etc/modules.conf file. This is normally not the case and answering YES to the last question will set everything up for you.

After the configuration is done, issue this command to start the sensors:

You can now start ksensors or gkrellm and configure the sensors display.

There's still one step to do: Starting the daemon in your default runlevel. As this is a task that depends highly on your distro and the desktop you use, the best is to search for a GUI interface to do this task. KDE normally ships with KsysV, the only thing you need is to drag the daemon's icon into the desired runlevel and copy it also into the "Kill" section of the runlevels 0 and 6 in order to get it stopped during shutdown or reboot.

You can also use chkconfig to set this up.

No, this mobo is keyed to a certain spec (2.4GHz) but my next mobo likely will support overclocking.

Also, I'm gonna have to try that configuration procedure.

Ah you have a safety mobo that wont let you OC, ummmmmmmmm idk what you cooling prob is, it just could be a weak fan. You could get the temp reader that goes in a CD drive bay, they aren't too expensive.

The configuration procedure you guys gave me simply does not exist. What version did it appear on? Was it since SuSE 9.1?

As far as my cooling problem, it was because I had the CPU fan taken out (or rather, broken) and was trying to blow air from the side intake fan on the heatsink, which was not adequate for continuous running over about 24 hours. That has been soved with a water-cooler kit, which I am wanting to monitor during operation of the computer--again, I want to know if playing Unreal or running TuxNES raises my CPU and system tepms, and by how much. This will also give me some idea as to just how good this water-cooler kit really is.

I'm a Linux user, I want more than what is needed for day-to-day operation!