On Fri 04 Jun 2021 at 02:05:52 (+0200), Stella Ashburne wrote: > > > Sent: Friday, June 04, 2021 at 5:12 AM > > From: "David Wright" <[email protected]> > > > > My own monitoring program logs the temperature (and battery) > > every six seconds. > > > I'm curious: what's the name of your monitoring program? Is it available for > download and installation from Debian's official repos?
It's just a home-grown program that's started from .xsession. It sets the X background colour in a loop, with excessive temperatures taking priority over power indications. It used to be written in shell, but I converted it to python some years ago when I found that reading the files in /sys/class/ could fail (3.x kernels). Python's try…except is easier for me to code than shell's trap mechanism. I wrote it originally for monitoring whether the AC power was connected (the brick was unreliable), and the state of the battery. Temperature came later, for the Dell laptop I mentioned. That laptop was scrapped last year, and ironically the Acer laptop it now runs on has a completely broken power controller (it only runs with AC power). Woefully underpowered to run even one browser, this Acer fortunately has a good fan, so it doesn't run too hot. But it does suffer from symptoms that are somewhat similar to the OP's—sometimes you have to wait a minute or two (and avoid touching the touchpad) for things to catch up. But you can tell it's merely swapping heavily, because the disk-active light stays lit. (Firefox on buster in ½GB at 1.5GHz, encrypted /home and 1GB swap.) Cheers, David.
