On Thu, May 01, 2003 at 09:57:31AM -0700, Jaye Inabnit ke6sls wrote: > Next, and this is what surprised me, is that when I installed the ACPI > functionality, I seem to have lost the fan support. I am not wording this > well. The fan *never* turns on now. I think it involves the system reading > the internal temp incorrectly. I have not yet dug deeply into the ACPI > module that controls the temp but I think I need to find out how I can > manually LOWER the temperature settings so that my fan turns on sooner to > keep the system safely cooled. Before I added ACPI, the system defaulted to > APM. With APM, my fan stayed on ALL the time, but it was unable to monitor > my battery or power state.
I recently got a Toshiba Satellite 5100 notebook, which, as far as I learned, is "legacy free", i.e. it has no traditional BIOS which includes not having APM. I installed Debian 3.0 (stable), and the fan on this machine gets on and off (with kernel-image-2.4.18-686). So, it seems that it is not generally such that the fan is dead with a plain vanilla kernel. I've heard, though, that it's at least possible to forcibly turn off the fan and thereby cause a system overheat with ACPI. Personally, I'd say that such would be a faulty design or implementation on the hardware side -- hardware should generally survive even complete hang of the OS without any permanent damage. ACPI settings should enable the user to choose whether the system should be fast and noisy or, alternatively, slower and silent, not to enable the user to fry the system. In the meantime, I have applied the toshiba ACPI kernel patch, which gives me the corresponding /proc entry. In /proc/acpi/toshiba/fan/status, there are two entries, "running" indicates whether the fan is on, and "force_on" indicates whether the fan is permanently on due to user request. There is no "force_off", and rightly so, I'd say. One question regarding patching the kernel: I tried to apply this patch (http://memebeam.org/toys/ToshibaAcpiDriver) the "Debian way", by setting up stuff in /usr/src/kernel-patches etc., but I found this rather tedious and eventually gave up and just patched the source manually. Are there any auxiliary tools for generating the scripts in the "apply" and "unpatch" subdirectores, or something like this? Greetinx, Jan -- +- Jan T. Kim -------------------------------------------------------+ | *NEW* email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | *NEW* WWW: http://www.inb.uni-luebeck.de/staff/kim.html | *-----=< hierarchical systems are for files, not for humans >=-----* -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
