Announcement

**TRobo** · Dec 27, 2022, 11:10 PM

I've been looking into this as well as I currently use the Thermal Monitor widget on my Kubuntu 20.04 LTS desktop for monitoring CPU/GPU and most importantly for me for monitoring HDD temps. I've already updated my laptop to Kubuntu 22.04 to see how the upgrade would go but I don't use the widget there. I decided to check out the comments for Thermal Monitor just to see if there were any recent issues, and that is when I learned about it needing ksysguardd to work, which I think was dropped for Plasma 5.22 as it is being replaced by ksystemstats (see https://quantumproductions.info/arti...tem-monitoring).

In theory ksystemstats looks better as it seems that it will be easier for the developers to maintain it going forward and because it has a plugin capability for dealing with new hardware sensors. Interestingly though, I think ksystemstats is still using some of the libraries that ksysguard was using previously, but maybe that will change more over time. I also note that there have been some bug reports for ksystemstats in relation to memory leaks, especially if you leave the new System Monitor tool open for an extended period of time.

I found that with the new System Monitor tool in KDE Plasma that it allows you to create and edit pages for sensors that you want to see, but that you can also choose to export these as a desktop widget directly from that tool. I tried doing this with text only info and then dragging it on to the panel, but I think I had too much info for it to work like Thermal Monitor does, so I gave up on doing it that way for now. I think this would have been the same as using System Monitor Sensor widget that you found as the interface/controls seem much the same, and System Monitor Sensor widget also seems to be using the new ksystemstats daemon for its info. I couldn't really tell how your efforts looked as the images you posted were too small to read and were too blurry if I zoomed in.

Another reason why I didn't really progress with a widget based on ksystemstats at this stage is that ksystemstats (like ksysguard before it) doesn't seem to be able to report on HDD temps, which is really what I am after. Thermal Monitor was using udisks2 in order to access this info. ksystemstats can provide information about disks but appears limited to disk usage type metrics at this stage.

I found another fork(?) of Thermal Monitor here: https://gitlab.com/agurenko/plasma-a...hermal-monitor that is still being maintained, although it is not packaged up so you would have to install it as per the instructions provided. I haven't tried it as it still requires the ksysguardd but I noticed in the code that they had added NVMe support through the nvme-cli package which the existing version did not have. Anyway, there was a bug report there in relation to Kubuntu 22.04 and the missing ksysguardd package and a reply from someone who manually installed the ubuntu deb package from an earlier release in order to get it working, but with a caveat that this could cause potential conflicts with both ksystemstats and ksysguard daemons running at the same time. I have not tried this approach so cannot endorse it.

I think what I will do when I upgrade my desktop is just to write a script and execute as a cron job to warn me if HDD temps go above a certain threshold, and forget about having a widget for this for now.

**Schwarzer Kater** · Dec 28, 2022, 06:34 AM

Thank you very much for your detailed answer, despite you also have been unsuccessful so far!

Originally posted by TRobo View Post

[…]
I couldn't really tell how your efforts looked as the images you posted were too small to read and were too blurry if I zoomed in.
[…]

I wonder why that is.
I understand that one can only see minimized versions of posted images when visiting this forum as a guest, but when one is registered to this forum and logged in one should be able to see the full size (I posted both images of the panels in 770 × 87 pixels).

Originally posted by TRobo View Post

[…]
I found another fork(?) of Thermal Monitor here: https://gitlab.com/agurenko/plasma-a...hermal-monitor that is still being maintained, although it is not packaged up so you would have to install it as per the instructions provided. I haven't tried it as it still requires the ksysguardd but I noticed in the code that they had added NVMe support through the nvme-cli package which the existing version did not have.
[…]

Thanks for sharing this link. But as you wrote: it still does need ksysguardd…
The Thermal Monitor Fix from the KDE Store I use also displays my NVMe in Debian 11 (with ksysguardd, of course). And the System Monitor Sensor plasmoid in Kubuntu 22.04 does this too, as shown in my images of the panels.

**TRobo** · Dec 28, 2022, 07:28 AM

Originally posted by Schwarzer Kater View Post

Thank you very much for your detailed answer, despite you also have been unsuccessful so far!

I wonder why that is.
I understand that one can only see minimized versions of posted images when visiting this forum as a guest, but when one is registered to this forum and logged in one should be able to see the full size (I posted both images of the panels in 770 × 87 pixels).

Oh, I see. Thanks for the explanation. I tried to view them without logging in (so as a guest) and only logged in to reply. I didn't realise that logging in made a difference, but yes they are clearer now. You did well with configuring System Monitor Sensor to emulate what you had previously with Thermal Monitor Fix.

Originally posted by Schwarzer Kater View Post

Thanks for sharing this link. But as you wrote: it still does need ksysguardd…
The Thermal Monitor Fix from the KDE Store I use also displays my NVMe in Debian 11 (with ksysguardd, of course). And the System Monitor Sensor plasmoid in Kubuntu 22.04 does this too, as shown in my images of the panels.

Yes, I should have mentioned that my NVMe drive temperature shows up with the new System Monitor tool in KDE Plasma also, as the sensor for it appears under the Hardware sensors group, but the temperatures for my HDDs do not appear there (or under Disks), so this must be a limitation of ksystemstats. My NVMe drive temperature also doesn't show (appears as OFF) with Thermal Monitor in Kubuntu 20.04, but perhaps I have an older version as I can't recall which one I had installed now (it shows as version 1.2.8 but I think I manually patched it with a fix at one stage).

**Schwarzer Kater** · Jan 11, 2023, 03:19 AM

Well, I kind of gave up with the System Monitor Sensor plasmoid… The output simply is too aesthetically unpleasing for my taste.

So I finally installed ksysguardd from Ubuntu 20.04 "Focal Fossa" as a .deb (https://packages.ubuntu.com/focal/ksysguardd) - fortunateley all dependencies were fulfilled by 22.04.

Now I can use Thermal Monitor Fix (https://store.kde.org/p/1408433/) with Kubuntu 22.04 and I like to look at my top panel again

- the questions are: for how long will this solution work and will it work in future releases of Kubuntu? Because as soon as there is a Kubuntu release (backports?) with Plasma 5.27 LTS I will upgrade for sure. We will see.

I would not claim that this topic is solved, because installing ksysguardd from a .deb seems only to be a temporary solution - unless somebody implements a much better System Monitor Sensor plasmoid, somebody rewrites Thermal Monitor Fix to work with System Monitor or programs a completely new plasmoid for this purpose…

**Nx-99** · Jan 11, 2023, 03:42 AM

Thank you very much.
Grazie mille

**claydoh** · Jan 11, 2023, 11:21 AM

Have you looked at creating your own widget (sort of) by using System Monitor Sensor widget(s), and customizing it to show what you want?
With third party widgets, you are at the mercy of whoever slapped it together bothering to update things as needed, when probably all they did was to hack together something and toss it out there.

The widget is both easy and difficult.
I used these to create an experiment for an unfinished dropdown nerd stats panel when I was using Latte Dock, so my example may be odd, as it is a very tall panel -240 - but you can see I quickly edited some existing widgets to show just a title and temp, which should scale to a normal panel, I think.
let's see:

These are using a gradient Gauge, or just the Digital Gauge Display Style which my plasma style is obscuring some theming elements, probably not good when shrunk down to a normal panel height

Lets shrink it down, install and modify the Colorful Sensor display style from within the widget

And more tweakage

Might work? It does allow, or rather requires, that one select specific hardware sensors (via lmsensors), which can be very useful for this purpose when standalone widgets don't look for the correct ones.

Attached Files

**Schwarzer Kater** · Jan 11, 2023, 01:14 PM

Thank you very much for your example.

Originally posted by claydoh View Post

Have you looked at creating your own widget (sort of) by using System Monitor Sensor widget(s), and customizing it to show what you want?
[…]
The widget is both easy and difficult.
[…]
Might work? It does allow, or rather requires, that one select specific hardware sensors (via lmsensors), which can be very useful for this purpose when standalone widgets don't look for the correct ones.

Yes, I did try a lot of things with the System Monitor Sensor plasmoid(s) to customize them to my liking - but I was by far not as successful as you were.

I have only used the GUI of the plasmoid so far (did you change configuration files "by hand"?) - and possibly it is a good idea to test it on a bigger panel at first and transfer the plasmoid to the smaller top (or bottom) panel later.
I also used lm-sensors some time last fall, perhaps I did something wrong there.

But the main problem was that I could not get the System Monitor Sensor plasmoid(s) to display the built-in "text style" at all (this could be the "Digital Gauge Style" you mentioned above… I will have to switch Plasma to English when I try again). Only the "Pie Chart Style" was able to display text in the panel (see my first post) - and I had tried all possible (built-in) styles, options and combinations.

Your example looks promising and I think I will give it another shot, if I have some spare time in the coming weeks.

**claydoh** · Jan 11, 2023, 01:29 PM

I had to install the 'Colorfull Sensor' display style, and experiment with colors and settings. The plasma style used has an effect on the text color, which can make elements disappear.
The 'text-only' is not quite what you want, it shows exactly like the bottom half of my GPU sensor in the tall examples.

here are how I have the CPU set up as shown

Attached Files

**claydoh** · Jan 11, 2023, 01:34 PM

And the NVME:

**Schwarzer Kater** · Jan 11, 2023, 01:34 PM

Wow, OK - I think I will try this tonight.

Thanks a lot for the screenshots!

**Schwarzer Kater** · Jan 17, 2023, 03:30 PM

I indeed did try the Colorfull Gauge plugin for the System Monitor Sensor plasmoid (which shows as Colorfull Sensor once it is installed) last Wednesday - but I have been at my other half's flat and only had my old MacBook with me. So today I tried it again and properly at home sweet home.

It looked very promising at first - unfortunately it is not quite the best solution for my setup, but I am sure it will be perfect for some people.

The main difficulty for me with the Colorfull plugin, I already encountered last week, was the height of my top panels where the temperatures should be displayed: only 24 pixels on my MacBook and "only" 40 pixels on my desktop computer.

The font size of the Colorfull plugin does not scale and cannot be changed by the user (except for selecting "Force compact mode" in the Colorfull Sensors Detail settings) like it is possible in Thermal Monitor plasmoid. The font size is fixed and fits quite well in a standard-sized panel - 44 pixels, iIrc. Within 46 pixels it is a perfect fit.
It looks much better on smaller panels when you uncheck the "Show title" option, but then you loose the labels for your temperatures…

The second "difficulty" (more of an annoyance) is that the width of the System Monitor Sensor plasmoid changes when the numbers change - the more plasmoids with temperatures you have side by side the more often they move slightly. This should be no problem with a fixed width font, but I guess most people (including me) use variable fonts for their GUIs.

So I am again back to the Thermal Monitor Fix plasmoid in combination with ksysguardd .deb for now…
For people who use the default height or a slightly larger one for their panels the Colorfull plugin for the System Monitor Sensor plasmoid can be a worthy successor of Thermal Monitor, though!

Colorfull plugin with "Show title" enabled (panel height 40 px):

Colorfull plugin with "Show title" disabled (panel height 40 px, also worked quite well on my MacBook with panel height 24 px) - this looks much better than my first "twisted Pie Chart solution" with System Monitor Sensor. Will be my "go-to" when ksysguardd does not work anymore in the future:

Thermal Monitor Fix (panel height 40 px):

PS: The temperature of my Nvidia GPU is not recognized by the System Monitor Sensor plasmoid anymore since the latest Nvidia driver update (525.x - the one before does work).

**Kumann** · Jan 24, 2023, 07:03 PM

I use Psensor and HWInfo.

**Schwarzer Kater** · Jan 24, 2023, 09:14 PM

How does this look in the panel? Could you post a screenshot?

**Schwarzer Kater** · Jun 13, 2023, 09:59 AM

Small Update

As mentioned above I installed ksysguardd as a .deb (version 5.18.4.1-0ubuntu1 from *Ubuntu 20.04) to get Thermal Monitor Fix working in Kubuntu 22.04.

I recently discovered that one can still get the .deb of ksysguardd version 5.22.0-0ubuntu1 from *Ubuntu 21.10 here:
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/impish/...ntu1_amd64.deb
AFAIK this was the very last version available for *Ubuntu and I replaced the one from 20.04 with this one from 21.10.

And for all you Debian KDE Plasma fans out there (the following is for Debian only - not for Kubuntu):

I now have encountered the same problem in Debian 12 Bookworm with Plasma 5.27 :
ksysguardd is not available any more in the repositories (no surprise, as KSysGuard itself is "unmaintained and no longer released by the KDE community").

The Workaround

In Debian 12 add to your /etc/apt/sources.list :

Code:

# added to install ksysguardd from Debian 11 Bullseye
deb https://deb.debian.org/debian/ bullseye main

And after sudo apt update && sudo apt install ksysguardd don't forget to either delete the entry from /etc/apt/sources.list OR create the file debian-bullseye-pin.pref in /etc/apt/preferences.d/ with the following content - or you will get a lot of problems (!!!) :

Code:

# to only install ksysguardd from Debian 11 Bullseye

Package: ksysguardd
Pin: release n=bullseye
Pin-Priority: 500

Package: *
Pin: release n=bullseye
Pin-Priority: -10

With this file in your /etc/apt/preferences.d/ you can just sudo apt update && sudo apt install ksysguardd in Debian 12 like mentioned above and you will get version 5.20.5-2 from Debian 11 Bullseye (but only ksysguardd and nothing else).

Perhaps both informations can help somebody else to keep using Thermal Monitor Fix in Plasma - in both Kubuntu and Debian.

Announcement

How to display CPU and other temperatures in a panel?

[SOLVED] How to display CPU and other temperatures in a panel?

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