On Thu, 12 Feb 2009, Jean Delvare wrote: > The major changes in this release will be: > * Completely reworked sensors-detect. This doesn't affect the sensors-detect code, but I think somewhere in the documentation, the stand-alone nature of sensors-detect should be emphasized. Something like: --- sensors-detect is a *stand-alone* tool to detect which hardware monitoring chips are present on your system. It does not depend on any other part of the lm-sensors package to work. (It is written in Perl, so you do need perl on your system.) If you are not sure about installing a particular version of the lm-sensors package, you can download the source for that version from http://www.lm-sensors.org/FIXME, unpack it, and just run prog/detect/sensors-detect by yourself. If you want to know if the latest version of lm-sensors has better support for your hardware, you can download the latest version of sensors-detect at http://www.lm-sensors.org/FIXME and run it. --- This next piece may be out of scope a little, but maybe the documentation should say something about using a packaged (usually by the distro) version of lm-sensors. I suspect a growing number of users are getting their lm-sensors this way. Something like: --- Many Linux distributions offer packages (dpkg on Debian and some others, rpm on Red Hat and some others) containing compiled versions of lm-sensors. Some advantages to using these packages are that they are probably a bit simpler to install, they integrate well with the rest of the system, and that you can probably get patches and updates via your distribution's normal update mechanism. A disadvantage is that the packaged versions tend to be a little older, and therefore may not support all of the hardware that is supported in the latest source release. Note that even if you have a distribution-provided package, you still have to configure lm-sensors for your particular motherboard (and other hardware) yourself. See FIXME for how to do that. If the Linux distribution you use offers an lm-sensors package, installing it is often a good place to start. If it detects all your hardware and you can configure it to your liking, then use it. But if the packaged version of lm-sensors doesn't detect all your hardware, or if you can't configure it exactly the way you like, it may be better to compile a more recent version of lm-sensors from source. See FIXME for how to do that. --- Matt Roberds
