Keeping Your Laptop Cool

Recently I have had to deal with a new install. I installed Linux Mint 17 on my dell vostro. After a hell of an ordeal of getting my nvidia optimus driver working I had a big problem with heat. The cpu was registering high 80's and when I manually turned on the fans it only came on for a second and turned off.

Thankfully I found a way to keep power and cooling running a little better....

First install the utilities to control the fan...

sudo apt-get install i8kutils

Then we need to edit the kernel start paramaters to load up the acpi correctly...

sudo gedit /etc/default/grub

Look for the line that says GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

And change it to:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="acpi_osi=Linux quiet splash"

Now reboot....you should find the laptop instantly running better. I did not 100% like how the kernel controled the fans, so I wrote a shell script that detects the current temperature, then depending on that value sets the fan to low, high or off

There are some software needed and setup to make all this happen....

sudo apt-get install lm-sensors i8kutils
sudo sensors-detect

Follow Sugestions / Guidelines / Results from that command and reboot

Copy the following into a text file (I called it keepcool.sh) feel free to look it over and modify it to suit your temperature requirements.

#! /bin/sh
#
#  Brief howto to set up script
#  sudo apt-get install lm-sensors i8kutils
#  sudo sensors-detect
#   Follow Sugestions / Guidelines / Results from that command
#   reboot or "sudo modprobe MODULENAME"
#   run "sensors" to test all sensors are ok
# 
# edit /etc/default/i8kbuttons and /etc/default/i8kmon and set ENABLED to 1
# /etc/init.d/i8kmon start
#

maincpu=`sensors | grep CPU | awk -F+ '{print $2}' | awk -F° '{print $1}' | awk -F. '{print $1}'`

if [ `echo "$maincpu <= 35" | bc` = 1 ]
then
	#turn fan off
	#echo "temp is $maincpu and turning fan off"
	i8kctl fan 1 0 > /dev/null 2>&1
	exit 0
fi

if [ `echo "$maincpu > 35" | bc` = 1 ] && [ `echo "$maincpu <= 40" | bc` = 1 ]
then
	#turn fan low
	#echo "temp is $maincpu and turning fan on low"
	i8kctl fan 1 1 > /dev/null 2>&1
	exit 0
fi

if [ `echo "$maincpu > 40" | bc` = 1 ]
then
	#turn fan high
	#echo "temp is $maincpu and turning fan on high"
	i8kctl fan 1 2 > /dev/null 2>&1
	exit 0
fi

Make the script executable

chmod +x keepcool.sh

Now we set up a cronscript to let the script run every minute

crontab -e

In that file put the following line, editing the path as necessary

* * * * * /PATH/TO/SCRIPTS/keepcool.sh

Now every minute the script will run and will run the fans as necessary keeping your system much cooler.

Menu

Keeping Your Laptop Cool