If you are lke me and often stress test your laptop (all my tests pictures you see are done on this laptop) like the post before shows chances are your machine gets hot alot. While todays machines are build to last long and endure more stress than ever before, it would be nice to to know at any given time whats the temperature of your machine. Some machine go hotter even without running all sorts of stress tests, but because of the siple fact that either your cooling system is broken or faulty. In linux there are nice packages you can download that will constantly show you your cpu temperature. But we don’t like that we want to see it on the terminal. :)

Just do cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/temperature and you will get your numbers (the path is not standard, so check your own proc temperature file).

This guy (http://crake.servu.org/~asmo/xhtml/Fujitsu-LifeBook-E6540.html) made a nice script that he puts in a cronjob. It runs every five minutes and checks for the temperature. If the temperature is lower than 40C it will turn the fan off, it will turn the fan on when the temperature reaches 50C.

#/bin/bash

# check temperature
temp1=`cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/TZ1/temperature | awk {’print $2′}`
temp2=`cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/TZ2/temperature | awk {’print $2′}`

echo “Current temperature TZ1: $temp1″
echo “Current temperature TZ2: $temp2″

# turn fan on when too warm
if [[ "$temp1" -ge "50" || "temp2" -ge "50" ]];
then
echo -n 0 >/proc/acpi/fan/FAN/state
fi

# turn fan off when not too warm
if [[ "$temp1" -le "40" || "temp2" -le "40" ]];
then
echo -n 3 >/proc/acpi/fan/FAN/state
fi