I am very close to achieving my goal of setting up a CPU temperature graph that is displayed in the top panel of my desktop. I have the applet and have gotten it to graph temperatures, which appear to be being sensed correctly. However, my machine doesn't find its temperature sensors by default; I have to run

sudo modprobe coretemp

for the sensors command to work, then log off and back in before the graph applet starts displaying my temperatures. I am wondering if I can somehow tell the kernel to load the coretemp module on startup so I don't have to keep doing these extra steps. I have tried putting this command in my startup applications, but I think its need for root permission is keeping this from working. Is there a way to set up startup applications with root permission, or some other way to ensure that this module is loaded at startup?

If anyone is curious, I'm running 64-bit Ubuntu 10.10 on a Lenovo G770 laptop with a Core i5 processor and the 2.6.35 kernel.