lggagnon I have got my fan to auto kickin and turn off again but it lets the laptop run fairly hot still. what temperature does your fan kick-in? cant confirm the function keys work for me unfortunately

netsurf: kicks in at about 40C, spins faster as it should at 50 and again at about 60C. Did you update the BIOS as I suggested? Also, remember my article states kernel version 2.6.36. With Ubuntu 9.04 you might have an older kernel than that, which perhaps makes a difference.

PS: Have you checked "top" to see if perhaps you have a runaway process that is consuming 100% CPU?

Laggagnon, forgot to mention I am using lucid on that laptop (10.04) its possible that maverick works better however there was no noticable difference when I checked previously with a live disk although its quite possible it could have been fixed. Your threshold for the fan kicking in appears to be alot lower than mine is however.
Start 55c
stop 40c
next fan stage at 60c
fnkeys do not work at all in terms of brightness control for me but if memory serves the suspend key does. They all print a "~" in the terminal instead of functioning.

I tend to be quick to capture CPU hogging tasks as I monitor my fan temperature and cpu usage just incase it gets that bit too hot

hello all,after suspend/wakeup,the fan speed control and fnkey adjust brightness work perfectly here.i don't know why,hope somebody could solve it.i have contacted to others,and get the same result.l526 here.

netsurf: those temperature kickins seems still reasonable. If you listen very carefully at 40C you probably should hear the fan whirring very very quietly. You did not answer my question though - what BIOS version are you using??

As described in my Arch wiki article, the Fn key will work properly with recent BIOS's, but you might have to bind the key combinations to specific facilities to get all you function keys to work. For instance I had to bind my brightness keys to "xbacklight" to get those keys to work.

Laggagnon, this is toshiba satellite L526, the fn key adjust brightness only works after suspend and wake up.Also ,fan speed adjust also works after suspend and wake up.I have test it in different distro (slackware, ubuntu) and different version ubuntu 9.10, ubuntu 10.10.

I have updated my bios use the latest version form toshiba site.

any suggestion?

can the BIOS be updated from linux? or do I need to re-install windows, Cause my BIOS is not corroborating with linux nicely, and I it hasn't been able to boot up windows. thanx

i believe there is a way to perform the update by extracting the bios firmware using the archive manager (ignore the fact that it is an exe) and boot with some key combination with the bios file on a fat32 pendrive.
must warn you right now this is very dangerous and could kill your laptop outright. it is far safer to setup a windows dualboot. the mechanism i describe is what i understand to be an emergency recovery from a bad bios flash and might not be any good to perform updates

Yes. See the bottom of my wiki article on how to do it here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...Satellite_L300

I already have the latest BIOS for my L300D (according to the Toshiba Europe site) and have tried to stop the fan from running constantly in Ubuntu, all to no avail. Will this happen with all Linux distros?

Do suspend and wakeup,and then fan control is avail.....This happen with my L526.

Tell us what BIOS you have and what kernel you are using.

Not sure, but if you have the same kernel and same BIOS as I have according to my wiki article then it should not matter what distro you are using.

Hello All

I have a Toshiba L300D-20D

The fan does not run to spec in lucid or maverick.
This is an extract from my notes (gotta write it down or I instantly forget)...


At first reboot the fan is running at max speed. Further analysis indicates ... Fan will not run at start or boot until emergency temp is exceeded when fan then runs at max speed. Fan will run continuously at low speed if wait until temp exceeds 50C and then reboot before emergency temp is reached.
No idea why this is, but the cure is (credit due someone else)...

sudo gedit /etc/default/grub
Amend line GRUB_CMLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash” to read
“quiet splash acpi_osi=Linux”
Save

Then DON'T FORGET !!!!!!!

Run sudo update-grub which updates /boot/grub/grub.cfg.


Reboot

Now.....fan on at 55C off at 40C.

I already posted that information in my wiki link - post #60 in this thread dated 29 Jan.

BIOS: Insyde H20 1.70
Kernel:2.6.35-28-generic

The earlier suggestion of putting my laptop into suspend seems to do the trick for some reason. A bit of a pain that you have to do that every time you boot up though but at least it means the Windows partition doesn't get as much use!