Overheating of laptops is a common issue one faces these days. In this article, we’ll learn how to check the CPU temperature on Ubuntu.

• Check CPU temperature in Linux command line

You can check the CPU temperature using a command line utility called sensors. Combine it with the watch command to keep on monitoring the CPU temperature in the terminal like this:

watch -n 2 sensors

If your distribution doesn’t have sensors command installed already, you can use your distributions’ package manager to install either sensors or lm-sensors package.

You can see the CPU temperatures refreshed for each core every two seconds:

Every 2,0s: sensors

iwlwifi-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1:        +39.0°C

acpitz-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1:        +27.8°C  (crit = +119.0°C)
temp2:        +29.8°C  (crit = +119.0°C)

coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Package id 0:  +37.0°C  (high = +82.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 0:        +35.0°C  (high = +82.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1:        +35.0°C  (high = +82.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 2:        +33.0°C  (high = +82.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 3:        +36.0°C  (high = +82.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 4:        +37.0°C  (high = +82.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 5:        +35.0°C  (high = +82.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

• Check CPU temparature with Psensor GUI tool

We’re going to use a GUI tool, Psensor, that allows you to monitor hardware temperature on Linux. With Psensor you can:

• monitor the temperature of the motherboard and CPU sensors
• monitor the temperature of the NVidia GPUs
• monitor the temperature of the hard disk drives
• monitor the rotation speed of the fans
• monitor CPU usage

The latest version of Psensor also provides an applet indicator for Ubuntu and thus it makes the monitoring of hardware temperature even easier on Ubuntu. You can choose to display the temperature right in the top panel itself. It can even send a desktop notification when the temperature exceeds the limit.

Install Psensor on Ubuntu 18.04 and 16.04

Before you install Psensor, you need to install and configure lm-sensors, a command-line utility for hardware monitoring. If you want to measure hard disk temperature, you need to install hddtemp as well. To install these tools, run the following command in a terminal:

sudo apt install lm-sensors hddtemp

Then start the detection of your hardware sensors:

sudo sensors-detect

To make sure that it works, run the command below:

sensors

It will give you an output like:

acpitz-virtual-0
Adapter: Virtual device
temp1: +43.0°C (crit = +98.0°C)
coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Physical id 0: +44.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 0: +41.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)
Core 1: +40.0°C (high = +100.0°C, crit = +100.0°C)

If everything seems alright, proceed with the installation of Psensor by using the command below:

sudo apt install psensor

Once installed, run the application by looking for it in the Unity Dash. On the first run, you should configure which stats you want to collect with Psensor.