Hi all. I'm trying to control the fan speed on my laptop (IBM Thinkpad T43.) I used lsmod and saw that the thinkpad_acpi module was already load, but I know I need the fan_control=1 option so I did this:

$modprobe thinkpad_acpi fan_control=1.

Then I did: $echo level 7 > /proc/acpi/ibm/fan

and I get an error: write error: Invalid argument

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong here, I really need help.

Also, if I wanted to load the module thinkpad_acpi at boot time with the fan_control=1 option, should I add it to /etc/rc.modules? In other words, does the rc.modules file override udev? And do I need to remove the module before reloading it with the fan_control=1 option?

Thanks in advance for any help I can get on this. I really need some control over my fan speed, as it seems by laptop is running rather hot.

Ok I figured it out. I guess I did need to remove the module before reloading it with the fan_control=1 option. For now I'm just gonna put the following in /etc/rc.d/rc.modules:

/sbin/rmmod thinkpad_acpi
sleep 2
/sbin/modprobe thinkpad_acpi fan_control=1

If anyone knows better way of doing this please lemmie know. I'm still learning, and I don't really know too much about udev yet (how to prevent udev from loading a module, for example)

Next project: thinkfan