I have a Compal Cl56 laptop which dualboots W2k and Ubuntu (Breezy 5.10)

I noticed about a week ago that my fan was not running and the underside of my laptop was getting pretty hot. So I did some google searches to see if there was a solution to the problem. There were many "solutions" to the problem, but none of which actually solved my problem.

As the solutions tried to tell me, I messed around with the sensor settings and tried to find the fans using sensors-detect but it kept turning up "Sorry, no chips were detected" and no other ACPI utility could find my fan.

I use the Omnibook drivers for ACPI because...well...thats what all the "Ubuntu on Cl56 laptop" how-to's kept telling me to do. I looked at the different files in the /proc/omnibook directory and this is what it gives me
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$cat /proc/omnibook/fan
Fan is on (level 21)
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**Although, the fan is not running.

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$cat /proc/omnibook/fan_policy
Fan off temperature: 0 C
Fan on temperature: 0 C
Fan level 2 temperature: 0 C
Fan level 3 temperature: 0 C
Fan level 4 temperature: 0 C
Fan level 5 temperature: 0 C
Fan level 6 temperature: 9 C
Fan level 7 temperature: 100 C
Minimal temperature to set: 25 C
Maximal temperature to set: 95 C
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** I tried to change these values by doing
$ echo 60 70 80 > /proc/omnibook/fan_policy ; but when I did this, my computer instantly crashed and completely shut off.

When I run "acpi -V", I get the following mesage.
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acpi -V
Battery 1: charged, 100%
No support for device type: thermal
AC Adapter 1: on-line
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What worries me is that nothing (aside from the omnibook driver) is seeming to recognize the fan or thermal sensors. I know that its a configuration problem because the fan runs in windows, it also runs when I first turn on the computer and it runs until I get to the Ubuntu startup screen but it never runs past that point no matter how long I have the computer running.

I think its the omnibook driver which is doing this, because it has the fan off and on temperatures set at 0 C, never allowing the fan to come on. So, I was thinking one thing to try was getting rid of the omnibook driver, but I don't know how to do that.

Can anyone help me with this!? Im confused and I don't want my laptop to fry.

edit...

Didn't read it still worked under windows. Sorry...

Will formatting then re-installing a fresh copy of Ubuntu (or maybe FC4...dont know yet) would maybe fix the problem or help at all?

This will only work if _you_ changed a configuration somewhere, and that is the cause of your problem. If it never worked in the first place, then you can't expect it will start working after a new install.

If you use a different distro then maybe it will...

That won't work because you essentially changed the contents of that file to:
Sorry I cannot help more.