[olug] Suse9.1 Dell Latitude C800 P3 1GHz

[Eric Penne]

I isntalled Suse on my laptop.  It already had 9.0 on it but the hard
drive crashed and I got a new 20G hard drive so I put 9.1 Pro on it.  I
was warned about the processor temps using suse9.1 so I did a little
investigating.

ACPI works pretty well for this laptop.  The laptop allows 1GHz or 700MHz
for the processor speed.  There are 2 fans on the processor and they
didn't turn on until the processor hit 75C and shut off at 70C.  Users
have reported many failures of hard drives and other components that they
blame on the heat of the system.

ACPI kepts pushing the speed down to 700MHz and not letting it back up
because the temp never came down below 65C.  I was definitely losing some
performance on my laptop.  BTW, 2.6 kernel seems faster on this laptop
than the 2.4 kernel.

I snagged gkrellm to see if it could monitor the processor temp and
control the fans on the processor.  Unfortunately Dell's ACPI
implementation doesnt show anything but processor temp in /proc/acpi/.

Google led me to the i8kutils and an i8k kernel module that was made to
control most Dell laptops made in the last 5 years.

I found out that since 2.5.something the i8k module is included in the
kernel so I loaded it.  I found the i8kutils rpm somewhere for Suse.  It
worked!  I had manual control of the fans now and a new /proc/i8k listing.
It was still only manual control though.  I wanted something automatic.

Google comes through again with the i8krellm module for gkrellm.  I had to
compile this one though.  The rpms for FC and mandrake for the i8kutils
(which I installed earlier) included the gkrellm plugin but the Suse RPM
did not include it.  BINGO!  Gkrellm worked with the fans and gave me
automatic control of the fans when the processor hit certain temps.

Each fan is controlled separately and each has 2 speeds with a different
temp cut in for each speed.  The gkrellm plugin also has different setting
for battery or AC power.  The automatic control also has a hysteresis
setting.  Hysteresis of 5 and a temp setting of 55 makes the fan turn on
at 60 and shut off at 50.


Works great.  I wish Suse included the RPMs with the distro but it wasn't
too difficult to set up.

Later
Eric