Warning: tampering with the fan control on you laptop is potentially dangerous, and I will not take any responsibility if anything happens to your machine. With that being said; I have used Thinkfan for various Thinkpads (7 I think) with no problems at all. Just be warned.
A lovely Lenovo T420 has recently dropped into my possession – not the worst thing that can happen. Well, actually it is a company laptop – but enough with the chit-chat.
Linux support on this machine is far from perfect, but one of the most annoying things about it, is the fan noise. It is constantly on at ~3500rpm and very noticeable (read: annoying).
First, install Thinkfan. (I owe my sanity to these developers!)
$ sudo aptitude install thinkfan |
To enable fan control, the kernel acpi module must be enabled with explicit support.
$ sudo su -c "echo \"options thinkpad_acpi fan_control=1\" > /etc/modprobe.d/thinkfan.conf" |
And reload the module.
$ sudo modprobe -rv thinkpad_acpi && sudo modprobe -v thinkpad_acpi |
We also need the coretemp module, which is not autoloaded.
$ sudo modprobe -v coretemp |
To make it autoload, append it to /etc/modules.
sudo su -c "echo \"coretemp\" >> /etc/modules" |
Now, edit /etc/default/thinkfan to enable the thinkfan service to start. There are a lot of precautions here 😐
START=yes |
Then, the following to /etc/thinkfan.conf, just after the comments – before the threshold declarations.
sensor /sys/devices/platform/coretemp.0/temp1_input sensor /sys/devices/platform/coretemp.0/temp2_input sensor /sys/devices/virtual/hwmon/hwmon0/temp1_input |
Finally, start Thinkfan.
sudo /etc/init.d/thinkfan start |
And.. Enjoy the silence 🙂
Heads up for the people who led me to the solution:
[1] http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1749186#9
[2] http://thinkpad-wiki.org/Thinkfan
Hi,
I followed your instructions, and I noticed that the fan became indeed very quiet.
After I followed these instructions http://prjorgensen.com/2012/10/27/ubuntu-12-04-1-power-tweaks-on-a-thinkpad-t430s/ to try gaining some autonomy.
Then I rebooted my laptop and the fan became a little bit crazy.
Do you think these two manipulations are not compatible ? Or maybe it is because I use Jupiter too, for energy saving ?
I’m not a newbie in Ubuntu but I’m no specialist either. Do you habe an idea for my problem ?
Thank you by advance !
Hi again,
I made some research and I’ve found some better settings for my laptop here http://www.jakubkotowski.com/2011/06/thinkpad-t420-thinkfan-settings.html
The probem seem to be solved 🙂
Thanx !
Hi!
Great to hear that you managed to solve the problem. I hope you will be happy with your Thinkpad 🙂
Feel free to ask if you run into more issues.
Best
/Kim