Temperature Monitoring and Power Managing in Ubuntu

My notebook came with pre-installed Vista. I used it for a few days. It had all the drives and utilities installed. When I switched to Ubuntu on this machine, I couldn’t find alternatives to some of those utilities like power profile manager and system temperature monitor in the default installation. However, after some quick searching, I found a way to do all these in Ubuntu;

For temperature monitoring, install “Computer Temperature Applet” for Gnome (and dependencies) by typing :

sudo apt-get install computertemp lm-sensors

in the terminal.

Then, to activate power profiles, type:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure gnome-applets

in the terminal, and say ‘yes‘ to ‘Install cpufreq-selector with SUID root“.

You can now add “Computer Temperature Monitor” and “CPU Frequency Scaling Monitor” to your gnome-panel. You can decrease heat and improve battery life by using the power profiles.

Here’s how it looks =) :

(and yes, i like showing off my desktop =).. )