Hi Matt, On Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:11:11 -0600 (CST), Matt Roberds wrote: > 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.) I've just updated our documentation to mention the stand-alone nature of sensors-detect, thanks for the suggestion. > > 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. lm-sensors 3 is hardware-agnostic. There is no such thing as "the latest version of lm-sensors has better support for your hardware" anymore [1]. This required enough time and work to get there that we should not mislead the user into thinking this did not happen. The typical scenario would rather be: sensors-detect from my distribution didn't detect my hardware, try the latest version of sensors-detect from lm-sensors.org and see if it finds more. Then look at the wiki and see which kernel I need - because in most cases, if the distribution's sensors-detect didn't find my chip, it also means that the distribution's kernel won't support it. At this point there are 3 options left: upgrade to a more recent distribution if possible (easier for beginners), backport the driver I need (requires help from developers), or install a newer kernel myself (for experts only.) [1] An exception being brand new features such as power or current sensors, but this is so specific that people who need this probably don't need to be guided step by step. > --- > > 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. The above it true for every part of a Linux system, it is absolutely not specific to lm-sensors. > > 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. See above. If things don't work then the user will have to build a new kernel, not a new lm-sensors (as already explained in the README file.) And I don't want to guide people through this, that's way too complex for most Linux users. Rather than spending time documenting things most users won't be able or willing to do, I think we're better spending it on pushing support for new chips to the kernel faster, and release new versions of lm-sensors more frequently, so that users can use what's in their distribution and it just works. -- Jean Delvare
