I just installed Ubuntu on my laptop (a semi-custom job, bears resemblance to a CL56) and I like it. I'm very concerned that the laptop may be getting too hot, I haven't had any problems, but it feels warm and when I tried checking temperature with acpi I found that it wasn't supported. I also found that the /proc/acpi/fan and thermal directories are empty.

I messed around with a variety of options that I found on here (lm-sensors and several monitors which ended up relying on the acpi stuff) but nothing ended up working so far.

Does anyone have any advice? It seems like the opposite problem (fans running too much) is more common by searching these forums. What does it mean if those directories are empty?

Any help will be greatly appreciated, I'd like to move this laptop to Ubuntu only so I can do linux development.

Firstly, do you have acpid running. Its the daemon that looks after all your power needs. Is it stock kernel. Do you have frequency scaling set up. (can your processor support it) Cpu is likely to be the culprit for producing heat if running flat out all the time. Try
cat /proc/cpuinfo
for details of cpu speed.

I'm fairly sure acpid is running, when I query acpi I can only get the battery state and the state of the AC power, and as I understand this is only possible if acpid is running. (if the existance of /proc/acpi does not mean acpid is running, how do I make sure it starts?)

speedstep is running as well, I have a monitor that shows that at the moment I'm running at 600mhz rather than the max of 1.8ghz.

To clarify, acpi seems to be working with the exception of the thermal/fan reporting stuff, so I don't know if that means that the thermal/ fan don't work at all under Linux (this is a dual boot system, so I know the fan itself works) or that I just can't access/control them via acpi.

Just checked my machine and my fan directory is empty too, but I do have thermal info. I know thats not much help to you, but I quite often have my hand in front of the fan outlet ( while i'm lazing on the lounge sort of holding it ) and I definately feel it going hot then cold. Is there always hot air coming out of yours?
Hadnt worried too much about it, cause its not always hot, which means something is working right.

The fan (on windows) only turns on for short bursts, that's the way it's meant to work. I'm pretty sure that via some internal sensors it knows when to cool itself down, and because it's built to run very cool, rarely has to turn on the fan. This is part of what makes it difficult to check if the fan is working, I have no way of knowing how hot it is or how hot it has to be for the fan to turn on, so I can't judge if it's working properly without any info from acpi.

Sorry, jumping ahead of myself. I think from memory that the stock kernels dont have the fan and temp modules compiled? Therefore your proc directories for them will be empty.
So if its a stock kernel, try lsmod, to see if the fan and thermal modules are loaded. If not check to see if you have them with 'modprobe -ls'
If not you might need to compile a new kernel with support for them. If you cant find them with the above commands, check your kernel configuration file to see if they were checked for compilation. I compile all my acpi stuff into the kernel so i dont have to stuff around with modules, its just there when the machine boots.

Thanks for the tip, for the moment I'm not too worried about it, my fan turns on (I tried running a heavy load to check) it just seems I have no control over it, but I'll trust the bios to take care of it (this laptop runs really cool anyway.

I appreciate the acpi advice, when the time comes for me to recompile the kernel, I'll definately consider your advice.

HI!
I had the same Problem with ubuntu 5.10 on my centrino notebook.
My fan turns on, and ran all the time even though the temperature was very low.
The acpi thermal module (thermal) was loaded and acpid was running.
I fixed it with modprobe thermal. this command reloads the thermal module and checked if
fan have to be running. you see more information about it in dmesg.
after modprobe thermal, the fan stopped, if the temperature is low.
I put modprobe thermal in the /etc/crontab to run it every minute. :-D so I have configured and optimized my
system completely!
Are there other (better) solutions for this problem?

if you can do the above you are ok. Most likely you may not have cpufreq installed OR the scaling governor is set to 'userspace'.

HI!
Thanx, my scaling governor is userspace, how can I set ondemand?
And what is the difference?

create a start up script /etc/rc.d/rc.powerprofile which does this

make it executable chmod +x /etc/rc.d/rc.powerprofile
and at think its the end of the /etc/rc.d/rc.local or rc.M you load it. Look at the other scripts for a guideline.

ondemand runs cool and your processor clocks up and down depending on the usage
powersave does what it says
performance runs hot
userspace you are able to manually set your clock speed.
For most people's usage, ondemand is recommended.

I have a similar problem, though I am running suse10 on an averatec 1050. My fan won't come on, and it's getting quite hot. There is nothing in either /proc/acpi/fan or /thermal_zone. If I run acpi -V I get info on my battery and cable but:
No support for device type: thermal

modprobe -ls shows both a fan.ko and themal.ko and lsmod lists: fan 4996 0 as well as thermal 14472 0 and processor 24380 2 acpi_cpufreq, thermal

Any idea on where to look from here?

you need to recompile your kernel.
Under PowerManagement, look for acpi and enable (checkmark not modules) everything like fan, powersave, ondemand etc.
Use userspace no performance as the default profile, so that you can set your throtling to suit your needs