kima/README

Description:
============
This applet monitors various temperature, frequency and fan sources in your kicker panel. 
Make sure you have enabled a supported kernel module.


Licence:
========
GPLv2


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, see NVidia notes below)
 - 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:
 - battery source that displays the state of charge of your batteries through libhal
 - uptime source that displays the current system uptime

misc:
 - cpufreqd control module to switch cpufreqd profiles via cpufreqd remote interface


installation:
=============
run configure:
	./configure --prefix=$(tde-config --prefix)

build the sources:
	make

install the applet (with appropriate rights):
	su -c "make install"

finally add the applet to your TDE panel (RMB on kicker)


CPU Frequency Daemon Notes:
===========================
If you have cpufreqd configured and running on your machine, Kima will provide a sub-menu called "Performance Profiles" where you can choose one of the preconfigured profiles for cpufreqd. Choosing one of the profiles will automatically put cpufreqd in manual mode. You can use "Select dynamically" option from the menu to return back to the dynamic scaling. Please don't forget to enable cpufreqd remote controlling in cpufreqd.conf (enable_remote=1) and give enough permissions to cpufreqd socket ("remote_group" option in cpufreqd.conf, see man pages for details).
Known limitations:
 - cpufreqd should be started before Kima (it's not a problem when you do everything from your startup scripts)
 - Since cpufreqd does not provide means to detect its current mode (manual/dynamic), in rare cases "Select dynamically" check can be inconsistent with the real daemon state. This is inconvenient but does not affect program functionality.


NVidia thermal source notes:
============================
By default the nvidia-settings tool is used to obtain the GPU temperature. The configure switch "-with-nvcontrol=/absolute/path/to/libnvcontrol-dir" can be used to increase Kimas performance. Using this switch the libXNVCtrl.a gets statically compiled/linked into libkima.so and is used to query the temperature(s) of your NVidia card. The most recent nvidia-settings sourcecode can be downloaded from: ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/nvidia-settings. Here is an  usage example:
 ./configure --prefix=$(tde-config --prefix) --with-nvcontrol=/home/$USER/nvidia-settings-1.0/src/libXNVCtrl