How To Display and Change Fan Speed in Ubuntu

You can measure your system performance while measuring fan speed. Sometimes, you need to check and want to display and change your fan speed. The lm_sensors is a Linux monitoring sensor you need to use for displaying the fan speed.

This open-source CLI tool provides drivers and commands for monitoring GPU/CPU fan speed, voltage, and temperature and changing them accordingly. In this guide, we go through the installation process of lm_sensors and explain how to display and change the fan speed in Ubuntu.

How To Display and Change Fan Speed in Ubuntu

You can display the fan speed in Ubuntu by following simple steps. Here, we explain two methods by which you can exactly understand the fan speed and its temperature.

Using Command-Line Interface

You can install the lm-sensors package through the package manager. To install the lm-sensors in Ubuntu, update the database of your system through the following command:

sudo apt-get update

To install lm-sensors in Ubuntu, type and execute the following command:

sudo apt-get install lm-sensors

After the successful installation of lm-sensors, you can generate and detect a list of kernel modules using the following command:

sudo sensors-detect

Hardware probing will start after running the previous command. To create the /etc/sensors3.conf file, you must press the Enter key to all the questions. This file starts service automatically at boot time and loads Linux kernel modules.

You can display the /etc/sensors3.conf file using the following cat command:

cat /etc/sensors3.conf

To display the fan speed in Ubuntu, please type the following command into the terminal:

sensors

The previous output shows the fan speed and temperature that you need.

Alternatively, you can use the grep command to filter the previous data.

sensors | grep -i fan

You can also display the fan speed on the screen using one of the following watch commands:

watch -n1 -d sensors

watch -n1 -d' sensors | grep fan'

watch -n1 -d 'sensors | egrep "fan|temp" | grep -v "0.0"'

Using Graphical-User Interface

Ubuntu offers many applications through which you can easily view the fan speed. Several are Psensors, xsensors, plugin, applet, and Plasma 5 applet. You can easily install one and display the fan speed using a graphical user interface.

Now, we will install the Psensor and explain the GUI method by which you can display the fan speed.

First, install the previous application using the following sudo command:

sudo apt install psensor

To open the Psensor application, search it in the application menu or execute the following command:

psensor

Now, you can easily see the fan speed in Ubuntu by simply opening one application.

You can also install the GKrellM GUI tool to get information about the fan speed to control them. Execute the following command in the terminal to install GKrellM in Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install gkrellm

Once you install GKrellM, run the following command in the terminal to open it:

gkrellm

First, right-click on your username and then click on Configuration to configure the tool.

Now, click on the sensors. Here, you can configure the fan speed and control according to your system requirements:

It will help you to change and check the fan speed in Ubuntu.

Conclusion

Checking and controlling the fan speed is easy in Ubuntu because you only need to configure the sensors in the system. In this guide, we explained different methods to display and control the fan speed. First, we installed lm_sensors in the CLI method and saw how you could display the fan speed and other parameters. On the other hand, with the GUI method, you can install any of the applications previously mentioned and measure the fan speed directly through said application.

How To Display and Change Fan Speed in Ubuntu