HowTo: Conky hddtemp

[tturrisi]

How To get conky to display hard drive temperature as a non-root user

Newer versions of Conky have hddtemp as a built in variable and the below guide is no longer necessary. See this this post on page 3 of this thread.

Caveat:
hddtemp requires root privledges to use.

Workaround:
use netcat as a non-root user to obtain the hard drive temperature.

Prerequisites:
1. conky installed & working apt-get install conky
2. hddtemp installed apt-get install hddtemp

note: this guide is if have one hard drive though can be modified to use more than one hard drive.

config hddtemp to run as a daemon:
# sudo gedit /etc/default/hddtemp

# Defaults for hddtemp initscript (/etc/init.d/hddtemp)
# This is a POSIX shell fragment

# Master system-wide hddtemp switch. The initscript will not run if it is not
# set to true. STOP THE SERVICE BEFORE DISABLING IT!

# [automatically edited by postinst, do not change line format or set it to
# anything but false or true ]
RUN_DAEMON="true"

# List of devices you want to use with hddtemp. If none specified,
# hddtemp will probe standard devices.
DISKS="/dev/hda"  # your hard drive here hda or hdb etc.

# List of devices you want to use with hddtemp, but that would not be
# probed for a working sensor.
DISKS_NOPROBE=""

# IP address of the interface on which you want hddtemp to be bound
# on. If none specified, goes to 127.0.0.1. Use 0.0.0.0 to bind hddtemp
# on all interfaces.
INTERFACE="127.0.0.1"

# Port number on which you want hddtemp to listen on. If none specified,
# the port 7634 is used.
PORT="7634"

# Database file to use. If none specified, /etc/hddtemp.db is used.
#DATABASE="/etc/hddtemp.db"

# Separator to use between fields. The default separator is '|'.
#SEPARATOR="|"

# Logging period (in seconds) for the temperatures.
SYSLOG="300"  # 300 = every 5 minutes

# Other options to pass to hddtemp
OPTIONS=""

edit your .conkyrc
$ gedit .conkyrc

add this line in the TEXT section:

TEXT
Hard Drive Temp: ${execi 300 nc localhost 7634 | cut -c29-30 ;}C

What it does:
The conky command $execi executes netcat at an interval of 5 minutes at localhost on the port used by conky 7634 and the result is cut to only the number value, the 29th & the 30th characters of the netcat result above, the hd temp.

example netcat result:
|/dev/hda|FUJITSU MHT2060AT|44|C|

determine YOUR cut values to use
Why? Because the result will be the model name of your hard drive and not all drives are the same!
$nc localhost 7634
count the characters in YOUR result and use those values in your .conkyrc