Kima, a kicker monitoring applet

I have tried many different hardware monitoring applications for my linux desktop. But most of them either did not work properly or slowed down my computer or occupied my precious desktop space unnecessarily, distracting me with graphs and plots. Then I found the perfect little KDE kicker applet which gave me exactly what I wanted - a simple monitor. It's called Kima.

It can monitor various temperature, frequency and fan sources and sits inconspicuously in the kde kicker panel. It can monitor hard disk temperatures, CPU temperatures, motherboard zone temperatures, laptop battery charge, system uptime, CPU usage and also fan speeds in rpm. It even supports monitoring the GPU temperature of an Nvidia card.

From Kima's website,

Features

Supported thermal sources:

• the Linux ACPI Thermal Zone driver. The corresponding kernel module is called thermal.
• the thermal sources of the Linux ACPI driver for the IBM ThinkPad laptops. The corresponding kernel module is called ibm-acpi.
• the IBM Hard Drive Active Protection System (HDAPS) driver. The corresponding kernel module is called hdaps.
• the Omnibook Configuration Tools & Patches. The corresponding kernel module is called omnibook.
• the iBook G4 CPU and GPU thermal zones. It may work on other Apple machines as well (please let me know).
• the thermal sensors available through hwmon (I2C, lm_sensors, ...).
• the CPU thermal sensor of the i8k kernel driver for Dell Inspiron and Latitude notebooks.
• the GPU thermal sensors of nvidia-settings (provided by the nVidia GPU card driver tools)
• the termal sensors provided by hddtemp daemon (make sure hddtemp runs on 127.0.0.1 port 7634 before kima starts)

Supported frequency sources:

• the Linux kernel /proc/cpuinfo interface
• the Linux kernel cpufreq subsystem

Supported fan sources:

• the fan sensors available through hwmon (I2C, lm_sensors, ...)
• the fan sources of the Linux ACPI driver for the IBM ThinkPad laptops. The corresponding kernel module is called ibm-acpi.
• the fan sources of the i8k kernel driver for Dell Inspiron and Latitude notebooks.

Misc sources:

• CPU usage source (for each CPU and/or commulative for all CPUs)
• uptime source that displays the current system uptime
• battery source that displays the current state of charge of your batteries

Misc:

• cpufreqd control module to switch cpufreqd profiles via cpufreqd remote interface

Give this little applet a try if you are looking for a simple monitoring application. I am sure you will like this one. For openSUSE 10.3, you will need to add the KDE:Community repository. To start the applet in KDE, right-click on kicker and select 'Add applet'. Choose Kima from the list of applets. Packages are also available for Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Mandriva, Slackware, Pardus and Gentoo on Kima's website. Cheers!