Power users are often concerned with making sure the components in their machines are running at appropriate temperatures. An unusual rise in the temperature of a CPU, for example, could indicate a poorly attached fan or generally suboptimal cooling configuration. This tip shows you how to add CPU temperature displays (and potentially more) to you Gnome desktop panel.
lm-sensors and sensors-applet packages. You can use the standard Synaptic package management tool, or from a terminal:sudo apt-get install lm-sensors sensors-applet
If, after performing these steps, you don't see any temperature displays in your panel, it could be that lm-sensors does not support the particular sensors available in your machine. You can double check this by running the sensors command in a terminal to see if lm-sensors can find any supported sensors.