slackware on a laptop

mortal · 01-04-2006, 10:33 AM

Hello

I just got an old 1750 armada compaq 333/64mb ram and was wondering why it overheated and shutdown when I was running Slack 10.2 on it?

---Is there something I need to configure for the cpu fan or is it just because I was trying to run KDE on it and it was too much for it?

Win98 ran fine on this notebook without heat problems and KDE is pathetically slow on this old compaq as I thought it would be (but not this slow!)....

Next time I will go with Blackbox but

---I need to know if there is some special configuring I need to do differently for a laptop other than using the bareacpi kernel.

I was running 2.4 kernel but I am going to try 2.6 and see how that goes to.

carboncopy · 01-04-2006, 11:19 PM

I have no knowledge about the said laptop. But, being and old laptop. The fan and CPU speed shouldn't be variable.

Use a system monitoring tool such as gkrellm to see what kind of CPU load you are own. I think blackbox or fluxbox would do you much good. Speed improvement will be a super noticable as compared to KDE on such a machine.

If you are getting very high CPU load even while (aparent) idling. Use

Code:

top

to identify which process(es) is hogging the CPU time.

mjjzf · 01-05-2006, 02:31 AM

You are sure it uses ACPI and not APM?
If ACPI: If fan support is built into the kernel, you can try the following evil hack, for which I deny all responsability, although I use it on my own laptop

-

Code:

# echo -n 1 /proc/acpi/fan/FN1/state => sets it to full power
# echo -n 3 /proc/acpi/fan/FN1/state => sets it to auto, 
which means it is activated automatically when the temperature reaches a certain stage.

yoron · 01-05-2006, 03:01 AM

look friend , that has probably nothing to do with software, when a machine overheats it's more likly to have to do with hardware than software, test by taking a hairblower and move it over your motherboard HD etc. Then you may find where the failure sits so to speak.
Then change that component, in case of the motherboard (which are most likely), you will either have to live with it, or get a new one.
Good luck.

mjjzf · 01-05-2006, 03:37 AM

Good luck with that on a laptop.
But I agree, it is more likely to be a hardware issue.
If you have thermal zone in the kernel, a temperature indicator called 'temperature' should show up somewhere in /proc/acpi/ -something (this is out of memory, I am sitting at a work computer with BuggyOS).
That way, you can get the system temperature by running - I believe it is:

Code:

cat proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/temperature

mortal · 01-05-2006, 06:56 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by OSourceDiplomat

You are sure it uses ACPI and not APM?[/code]

I think you're right,it uses apm....

Thanks for the replies.I'll mess around a bit more with it and try some of the ideas here.It's just for fun on this one luckily.