I’m using a toshiba portege m900 with opensuse 11.4 with gnome 3 as my DE. I am also new to linux FYI. I am having problems with the temperature that my laptop is reaching. I havent been able to display the temp but I can definitely feel it in my palms. Also when I restart I have to cool it first before it would continue to startup. I have a dual boot setup with windows 7 still in control. I dont get this problem with my windows 7. In fact when i boot to windows 7 my laptop gets cooled. How do I go about troubleshooting and fixing this problem? by the way these are the specs of my laptop - memory 3.0gb, processor Intel® Core™2 Duo CPU T6500 @ 2.10GHz × 2, grpahics Gallium 0.4 on AMD RV710 (on windows this ati mobility radeon 4500 series), OS 32 bit type.
My toshiba m511 has the same problem,I was gonna post a thread about it,then I saw your post,
at first my laptop too comes with a win7, I can clearly hear the different fan running under different speed between desktop and games,in games fan a much louder thus give me a much lower temp than suse, in games under suse,the fan always run in the same speed between games and desktop( with desktop effect) so it gives me 30%~40% hotter than under windows.
temp compare:
win7 desktop : 45~50
win7 games: 60~67
suse dekstop 59~ 63
ssue game: 71-83 ( I remember I saw 89 once)
and I found an old ubuntu snapshot cpu 45,gpu 48 desktop mode.
this must be something about fan control…I’ve installed nvidia 270 drivers and I’ve turn on the dynamic cpu freq.
So, I do not know how old these Laptops might be, but at one year, considerable dust can build up inside on the heat sinks and you need to use a can of compressed air (like duster) to blow out this dust from all accessible cooling vents on the laptop. You do not need to disassemble the laptop to do this. No matter how doubtful you might be, this is a very worthy task to undertake if your laptop is not brand new.
Next, have you made a visit to the web site support for your laptop and made sure that your BIOS has been updated to the most recent version? This BIOS code directly controls fan speed and practically every computer that comes out can benefit from and can receive a new BIOS update that can fix all sorts of issues, including CPU fan speed control. Always follow the manufacturer recommend method for doing a BIOS update.
In openSUSE you can set your CPU speed policy separate from the desktop you have selected. Please look here at this guide to do this:
There is a new setting that can reduce over all Laptop power usage will effect over all heat build up in that laptop. The new kernel load option setting is called pcie_aspm=force and can be added to your normal openSUSE startup line in the grub menu.lst file. Read the following article for more information in message #8.
Thanks for the replies. I already tried using canned air approach. So far I noticed that the heating up of my laptop is intermittent. I am not yet sure to the reason for this. I haven’t search thoroughly the forums but I cant find how to display the temperatures in gnome 3. I installed the computertemp applet for gnome panel but I can’t get it to work for my gnome 3, I can’t even access the applet.
I am trying the power management setups suggested as well. I will feedback here what I find.
I use lm-sensors to detect temp,also a nvidia desktop widgets,but I remember avant window navigator has some sort of cpu/gpu temp display,I’v found the problem, it has something to do with cpu sensor, every time I use lm-sensors it only display one cpu temp,nothing else,no fan no voltage stuff,and when I use nvidia-settings to get [fan:0] speed it says my gpu doesn’t have a fan, not weird since lots of laotop only got one fan not only belong to gpu.
since cpu sensor doesn’t work, I guess that’s why fan doesn’t work as expected. I’ve also installed the yast2-power-management,but not yet rebooted.so far with 3 firefox tabs 6 chrome tabs, armarok and ktorrent, I got 51c for the cpu, and 53 for the gpu,
I used the lm-sensors as well. Only one temp is showing also. Then I used gkrellm to display the temp in my desktop. I’ll try out the nvidia desktop widgets. My vid card is amd though, not sure if this will have conflicts. My normal cpu temp is at 52-55 C.
I’ve tried the yast2-power-management. Haven’t noticed any significant changes so far.
I forgot to mention that my cpu temp is still intermittent. Sometimes it reaches 96 C. What I do is just restart it and then it stabilizes. I am not yet aware as to why this is happening. But this interim solution is working so far…
Hi,it’s been a long time, I don’t know if you solve your problem already,but my fan finally worked as it should be under suse, I just add this line to the boot loader:
acpi_osi=“Linux”
the fan works the same as under windows, the temp lower than before about 8,
as the fan now finally works, I don’t care about the temp anymore,
Thanks for this info! I haven’t solved my problem. I’ll try out your suggestion. Where did you stumble upon this option? Also would you know how to enter multiple commands to the boot loader? At present my boot loader has defualt command of ‘vga=sumthing’ (forgot what it was exactly) i’ll post it when i re-login.