[ltp] Re: T61, Lenovo quality, Linux pre-installed, alternatives

[Thomas Kindler]

On Wed, April 23, 2008 01:21, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Apr 2008, Hendrik-Jan Heins wrote:
>
>> As for the temperature: how hot is that? And what are the temperature
>> readings from your machine. If it really gets hot, it means your cpu is
>> crunching numbers all the time, run "top" to see which processes make it
>> run all the time.

It's not a CPU load problem. I would estimate the palmrest temperature to
~50°C, too hot to touch for longer than a minute or so.

> Or does it mean that the reverse-engineered fingerprint driver (or its
> PAM glue) is leaving the darned thing on all the time, which is bound to
> not only waste power and cause thermal disconfort, but maybe even damage
> the fingerprint hardware eventually?

This bug is already known (and fixed):

http://thinkfinger.svn.sf.net/viewvc/*checkout*/thinkfinger/ChangeLog?revision=108

  [r88] libthinkfinger/libthinkfinger.c: Avoid the device to heat
        up if it was waiting for a swipe. Patch created with great help
        of Evgeni Golov <sargentd@die-welt.net> who measured the
        temperature.

BUT my X61s' palmrest still does get too hot to touch around the
fingerprint area. According to some people, it's the wireless card
underneath that gets hot:

  http://www.lesswatts.org/tips/wireless.php

  cd /sys/bus/pci/drivers/iwl4965
  echo 5 >*/power_level

This does help somewhatt, but it still runs _much_ hotter than under XP.

The X61 (non-s) and recent X61s (like mine) also have a second fan
installed to draw fresh air through the wireless card.  The fan _does_ run
constantly in linux, but it's not controllable yet by tp-fan:

  https://bugs.launchpad.net/tp-fan/+bug/210429

(I've not yet filed the bug to ibm-acpi).

> Time for someone to go after that bug, or to donate me a T61 with Intel
> graphics [..]

Why a T61?! This was about an X61!

-- 
"Zuse, Zuse" sprach die Tante, als das Rechenzimmer brannte.