Gnome and KDE have their own system monitoring tools.  However, I am a fan of GKrellM — even though GKrellM has been around for ages, I still use it a lot. It works with hddtemp to monitor hard drive temperatures; lists CPU temperatures and fan speeds if using lm-sensors; shows even the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) temperature on some cards.  A bunch of themes and plugins are available, too.

gkrellmd is the daemon that you can run on a separate Linux box. If you use “gkrellm --server hostname” where “hostname” is the name of the server on which gkrellmd is running, that server’s information will be shown in gkrellm. The benefit of such an approach is that you can use your locally-installed themes, for example. The “gkrelltopd” plug-in is also supported with this method (be sure to enable it as well as the host access list in the gkrellmd.conf file, usually found in /etc). If you choose not to run the gkrellmd daemon, you can run gkrellm remotely via “ssh -X user@hostname gkrellm” (substitute “user” with your username on “hostname”).

For the VIA ARTiGO A2000, I compiled a custom kernel (2.6.30) and loaded the w83l786ng module to get things working with lm_sensors. (Currently, I don’t know of any distributions that support this module, so that is why I resorted to compiling a custom kernel. Otherwise, the CPU temperature and fan information won’t be recognized by lm-sensors.)

gkrellm