Xsensors is simple, the xfce4-sensors-plugin looks great in XFCE, and the KDE4 System Monitor widget is all right, but it’s not very configurable and does no alerting.

I wish for a nice graphical front-end and alerter to lm-sensors GNOME and KDE release nice ones and then they disappear.

lm-sensors is still my top choice for monitoring temperatures, fans, and voltages: It’s not fun when your first warning of a failed CPU fan is a melted-down CPU. You can run a short or long self-test with a button click, and GSmartControl is especially valuable for quickly and easily finding log files and reading SMART attributes data, reading test results, and seeing detailed data on your hard drives. It’s been around seemingly forever, but did you know there is a graphical interface for it? SmartControl puts a nice interface on smartmontools and supports all of its functions. Smartmontools runs tests and reads data on drives that have the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.) system built into them. You’re probably familiar with the excellent smartmontools for monitoring hard drive health, and getting early warning of possible drive failure. Here are a handful of good tools for spotting possible hard drive failure, displaying hardware information and monitoring temperatures, fans, voltages, email, music players and more. Nothing ever need be a mystery on Linux as it has a large number of excellent utilities for discovering hardware and monitoring hardware health.

Linux hardware monitor