OpenSuse 12.1 on lenovo T61p overheating

English Hardware
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Hi, I recently installed openSuse on my lenovo t61p and even after installing any drivers i could find, i still find the mouse sluggish sometimes and it seems like it requires the intel chipset driver for the OS as windows always requires to work optimally. I couldnt find any intel chipset driver for download from lenovo or even intel for linux. Everytime i play a game like astromanace my laptop gets very hot and the screen sometimes goes black for 2 seconds skipping some things in the game. However my windows installation can play crysis, crysis2 and supreme command on high graphics without overheating.

I’m running openSUSE 64 bit and has 8 GB of ram so ram is not an issue. The laptop has a quadro 570M GPU which i installed the drivers for already. After installing openSUSE my windows installation can no longer hibernate or sleep since i dual boot both windows and openSUSE, using grub.

Is it possible to install software made for ubuntu on opensuse too? ubuntu uses apt but i dont like ubuntu since it tends to have problems with graphical program sometimes which at one point spoilt my windows installation through virtualbox.

Is it possible to adjust the fan automatically on the laptop through openSUSE?
I find it really difficult using gnome and not having a minimise button. I find that i cant even switch between windows after launching a full screen program/game or adjust the sound through hardware buttons.

thanks

2

Try adding this repository and installing the tp_smapi kernel module. It will allow more control over the embedded controller.

Index of /repositories/home:/damianator/openSUSE_12.1

You should have auto control over the fan. If not I would recommend navigating to the Thinkwikiwebsite for more information about Lenovo laptops and Linux.

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Follow Up

More information about fan control below:

Fan control scripts - ThinkWiki

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Follow Up

Fans

The thinkpad_acpi kernel module needs to be configured so user space programs can control the fan speed.

Create

/etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf

add the following line:

options thinkpad_acpi fan_control=1

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In addition to Romanator’s fine help, I see that the Lenovo ThinkPad T61p is some five years old (as a search I made said) and I wonder when the last time was you cleaned out the heat sinks on this laptop of dust? One can not believe how dusty a laptop can become or what effect it can have on its cooling. Perhaps you clean it often, but many do not and its help full to blast out any dust from a Laptop (through its many vents while turned off, battery removed and no power block connected) at least once a year using something like Duster Spray, a kind of frozen compressed air in a can. Further, there is a nice article about the Linux kernel and power consumption you can find here: GNU/Linux and openSUSE power management regressions - Blogs - openSUSE Forums and here is a nice script to set your CPU speed: C.F.U. - CPU Frequency Utilitiy - Version 1.10 - For use with the cpufrequtils package - Blogs - openSUSE Forums.

Thank You,

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i thought i was never going to get a reply. I cleaned out dust 2 months ago. I also know i need to change the thermal paste but it only overheats from high CPU usage. It uses a fast 65nm core2 which is why it overheats.

I still find booting to take longer after installing nvidia drivers and i still cant minimize or switch windows when running a full screen game for example.

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I still find booting to take longer after installing nvidia drivers and i still cant minimize or switch windows when running a full screen game for example.

For window behavior - navigate to Configure Desktop -->Window Behavior–>Windows Behavior
Switching windows use the ALT+Tab buttons. Another option is to run your game on one desktop and open alternate programs on another desktop.
I am using four different virtual desktops.

For nVidia effects, navigate to Configure Desktop -->Desktop Effects–>Advanced tab. Next to Compositing type change from XRender to OpenGL.