Hi,
In the past few days i became quite frustrated with my Toshiba Satellite L30-113a laptop. Thing is i can’t get the ACPI to work. Or should i say it works partially, the functional keys work, i got the sound and the wireless working, yet an important thing in the laptop is not working – namely the CPU fan. I did some research and found that Toshiba are not very Linux friendly, yet there must be some solution.

So far i have done this:

I turned on Toshiba support in the ACPI at the kernel and compile it.
The ACPI recognized and displayed the battery and the functional keys

#cat /proc/toshiba/ - missing
#cat /proc/acpi/toshiba - missing

#lsmod | grep acpi

pcc_acpi 14080 0
dev_acpi 12292 0
asus_acpi 17308 0

It is clear that toshiba_acpi is missing and the module is not loaded

#sudo modprobe toshiba_acpi

FATAL: Error inserting toshiba_acpi (/lib/modules/2.6.20-16-generic/kernel/drivers/acpi/toshiba_acpi.ko): No such device

#find /lib/modules/`uname -r` -name "tosh*"

/lib/modules/2.6.20-16-generic/kernel/drivers/acpi/toshiba_acpi.ko
/lib/modules/2.6.20-16-generic/kernel/drivers/char/toshiba.ko

Yet the module is present but it’s not loaded!

#lsmod | grep cpu

cpufreq_userspace 5408 0
cpufreq_stats 7744 0
freq_table 6048 2 cpufreq_stats,cpufreq_ondemand
cpufreq_powersave 2944 0
cpufreq_ondemand 8876 0
cpufreq_conservative 8712 0

#toshset – says that the module is not loaded

#acpi -V
Battery 1: charged, 100%
Thermal 1: ok, 54.0 degrees C
AC Adapter 1: on-line

#dmesg – nothing suspicious

Do you mean the fan does not start even if you do some intense job. try running
$ yes

(If you do not have this program install it with synaptic).

This should ramp up the CPU to top speed and in a few min you should hv the fan running. (Even in my laptop when I run linux the fan rarely starts whereas in Windows it starts every few min). This behavoir is fine.