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HOWTO: Monitor System Performance with GKrellm.

by Jon on November 19th, 2005

I recently posted an entry calling for ideas on what readers would like to know. I received several requests and am now starting to work my way through them. First off, I’m going to answer Kevin Humphrey’s request on how to monitor things like hardware temperature and fan speeds.

There are three applications that I’ve used in the past to monitor my system. They are Superkaramba, gDesklets, and GKrellm.

Originally I was going to write a single entry on all three, but this is a blog, not a novel. Even a cursory look at each application deserves its own entry. Therefore, this will be a three part series on monitoring your system.

First off I’m going to talk about GKrellm.

GKrellm comes pre-installed on many GNU/Linux distributions. From the GKrellm site:

GKrellM is a single process stack of system monitors which supports applying themes to match its appearance to your window manager, Gtk, or any other theme.

GKrellm itself is composed of modules and plugins. The modules are builtin and can monitor things like CPU, disk space, network activity and the like. If you don’t see a builtin module that you like, you can turn to the list of plugins that do specific things. Some plugins monitor system stuff, some show data from other areas on the network, and some are just pretty to look at. The list of plugins that GKrellm offers is impressive and includes:

• battery life
• clock
• system pager
• nntp servers
• mldonkey uploads/downloads
• wallpaper rotators
• cpu frequency

The list goes on and on. It’s entirely possible that you won’t need a tool other than GKrellm, you may just need to find the right plugin to use.

Installing GKrellm

You can install GKrellm by:

• On a Debian system: apt-get install gkrellm
• On an RPM system: yum install gkrellm
• Download the binary for your system from the GKrellm site

Configuring GKrellm

There are two ways to get into the GKrellm configuration:

1. Place your mouse cursor over top of the GKrellm application and press your F1 key, or
2. Right-click on the very top title bar of the GKrellm application and select Configuration. (NOTE: clicking on the title bar of a module rather than the top title bar may open configuration options specific to that module)

Either method will open up the configuration window. From here you can click on the various headings on the left pane and manage options in the right window pane. For example, to activate the CPU monitor, click on the CPU heading in the left pane and check the Enable CPU checkbox in the right pane. Each of the builtin modules can be enabled/disabled in this fashion and have options that can be configured in the right pane.

Installing Plugins in GKrellm

The GKrellm plugin page contains a long list of neato plugins that you can install into your GKrellm. As with many projects, though, not all of the links work and not all plugins will be offered in a package that you can use. Root through the list and pick out the ones that interest you and that are offered in a usable format. If the GKrellm site plugin repository fails to ofer something you’d like, a quick Google search for ‘gkrellm plugins’ returns a lot of results.

Once you’ve found a suitable plugin, download and install it on your system. For help on install different types of packages, read here.

Your new plugin should show up under the Plugin heading of your GKrellm configuration screen. NOTE: The plugin repository is only scanned when GKrellm starts. Therefore, if GKrellm is running when you install your new plugin, you will have to restart GKrellm before the plugin will show up.

GKrellm Themes

What’s a system monitor if it looks ugly? One of the best things about GKrellm is the ability to theme it to match your system. The picture on the right is my GKrellm with the Gotham City plugin installed.

To install a theme, find one you like from the GKrellm Skins Repository and download it. Most (if not all) of the skins seem to only be offered in a tarball (a tar.gz) file which means you’ll have to manually untar it. It’s important to untar it into the right place, or GKrellm won’t see it. In a home system, you’ll want to untar it into the .gkrellm/themes folder in your home directory.

Unlike the plugin, I didn’t have to restart GKrellm for it to see the new theme. I went right into the configuration page, clicked on the Themes heading and my new theme was just sitting there for me ready to use. I clicked it, and it took effect immediately.

Final Words

So, let’s get back to the original question: Can GKrellm monitor the hardware temperature and fan speed that Kevin wants?

By default my GKrellm has a CPU monitor which monitors usage as a percentage and temperature, but I don’t see a fan monitor. I went and looked at the plugins and there are some fan speed plugins in the repository, but I wasn’t able to get one working.

There are a number of things within GNU/Linux that require acpi modules or drivers. Most of the things that require acpi are power related (like suspend and resume functions), but I suspect that fan speed also fits into this boat. I don’t have any acpi stuff installed and I think that’s likely the reason why I can’t get the fan speed modules to compile. I also suspect that I won’t have any luck with fan dealies in Superkaramba or gDesklets either.

Conversely, if you have acpi stuff installed on your system, you may have more luck than I getting GKrellm’s fan speed module running.

Stay tuned for entries on Superkaramba and gDesklets which will follow over the next few days.

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