I have installed Mandrake Linux 10 Community release on my Dell Inspiron 5100, and everything seems to be working fine except for the system's temperature. Using gkrellm, i notice that the cpu temperature rises to 59C and hovers there if the PC is idle. However, whenever CPU load shoot up to 10% or above for more than half a minute, the temperature rises significantly. The fan works at high speed when the temp reaches 58, but not all the time, and many times the temperature reaches 75C without having the fan working.
I have ACPI set up properly (i think), because I can get a battery level reading, and Stand-by also works.
Also, i recompiled the kernel (ver 2.6.5) and added i8k support, whick would allow me to use the i8k tools to control the fan, but dmesg reports the following boot error:
Code:
i8k: unable to get SMM Dell signature
i8k: unable to get SMM BIOS version
I would appreciate it if others could share their experiences with this laptop or point me to things I can try to get proper temperature management.
Thanks,