http://www.stresslinux.org/sl/
Stresslinux is a lightweight Linux distribution designed to test a computer's hardware by running the components at high load while monitoring their health.
It makes use of some utitlities such as stress, cpuburn, hddtemp, lm_sensors, etc. It is dedicated to users who want to test their system(s) entirely on high load and monitor the health of these systems.
StressLinux runs from external bootable media: CD, USB stick, PXE boot, or you can run the VMWare image. There are good instructions for creating your chosen boot medium.
When you boot up, you have the option to allow sl-wizard to probe your system for sensors and then load the appropriate drivers
You can re-run this anytime after boot by deleting /tmp/sensors and then running the sl-wizard.sh script as root, like this:
stress@stresslinux:~>;sudo rm /tmp/sensors
stress@stresslinux:~>;sudo sl-wizard.sh
This is not an ordinary stripped-down Linux. It was built with SUSE Studio, and is based on OpenSUSE.
StressLinux uses Busybox in place of the usual coreutils, fileutils, and other standard Linux commands. Busybox is a single stripped-down binary containing several dozen commands, and it uses the ash shell, so you may find that some of your favorite options are missing. The Busybox command reference should help you.
Stresslinux uses the Fn keys in an interesting way. There are 6 ordinary ttys on F1-F6, and it boots to tty1 on F1. The rest are normal login ttys. On US keyboards you can switch between these with ALT+Fn. (STRG+Fn on German keyboards, which is the same as CTRL+Fn.) F10 displays eth0 throughput (see above), F11 shows hard disk temperatures, and F12 displays lm-sensors readings.