acer aspire one noisy fan fix

cmk77 · 01-10-2009, 04:13 AM

My acer aspire one has a very noisy fan. To solve this problem I took the following steps found on the internet:

download the acerfand daemon script
download the acer_ec.pl script
Copy both files to /usr/local/bin
make acerfand executable and change owner/group to root
open /etc/rc.local as root (or use sudo) and add /usr/local/bin/acerfand at the end of the file

Then I tried to to start the deamon by doing

Code:

/usr/local/bin/acerfand

but I got the message that dmidecode and acer_ec.pl are not found. This is because /usr/sbin and /usr/local/bin are not in root's path, so I fixed that by adding them to the PATH= line in /root/.bash_profile.

My question is: how do I verify that this works after rebooting? Is rc.local executed by root? And is the root/.bash_profile loaded before rc.local is executed? Where would the error messages (if any) go to?

Brian1 · 01-10-2009, 09:42 AM

I would think the error message would be found from the dmesg command output. If you use the full path to scripts then you should be set. Is there any errors if you run them manually?

What is the weblink to the fan noise fix you found. I was thinking of getting a few someday for dmz wired and wireless firewall, internet servers, and network storage using USB harddrive so just want to be ready and understand what is going on.

Brian

cmk77 · 01-11-2009, 04:47 AM

Here's the link: http://n00.be/archives/758/

There are similar links on the ubuntu NBR forums: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/As...#Fan%20Control

dmesg doesn't show any errors and there's no /var/log/syslog. My guess is that rc.local is run as user with sudo and since /usr/sbin and /usr/local/bin are in the user's path they don't need to be in root's path?

The noisy fan is my only problem with this machine: by default it's running full speed all the time with a high whining noise. With acerfand I enjoy the silence now. Unfortunately, the lm_sensors do not work by default: http://macles.blogspot.com/2008/08/r...-of-intel.html.

But, overall, I'm quite amazed at the quality one gets for such a low price.

IndyGunFreak · 01-11-2009, 08:18 AM

Thats odd, I can barely hear my fan running on my Aspire One, and I've never installed anything to regulate it..

Glad its working out for you..

IGF

cmk77 · 01-11-2009, 08:56 AM

Well, at first I thought mine was defective, but some googling and searching on http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/ revealed that it's a common problem. (533 hits for "fan noise" on the official forum!) I first did the live updates but that didn't solve the problem.

Brian1 · 01-11-2009, 10:39 AM

Not sure how rc.local is run. It is run as root but not sure what level of root it is. I always use full paths to commands in scripts. Saves debugging time.

Brian

cmk77 · 01-18-2009, 06:44 AM

I agree that it's better to use full paths, but in this case that means editing the acerfand and acer_ec.pl scripts. I don't want to do that because they are quite complex. To debug I added the following in rc.local:

Code:

echo $PATH > /home/user/myMessage.txt

This revealed that the path still did *not* include /usr/sbin and /usr/local/bin, even though I set that in /root/.bash_profile. So now I have modified /etc/rc.local as follows:

Code:

export PATH=/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin:$PATH
/usr/local/bin/acerfand

That solves the problem once and forall