Thinkpads Forum

Hi, I want to ask owners of this laptop who has or are running linux on it, if they use fan control software of any kind and if they know how to get it working in xubuntu 16.04 64bit.

On my R500 I have Xubuntu 14.04 32bit and tpfand installed because the CPU/GPU tend to get a bit hot, last version were made for 14.04 and 14.10, not 16.04 and not for 64bit, also I read something about thinkpad_acpi no longer is in the kernel.

I don't know if it's even needed on my X300 as I just started using it with 16.04 yesterday, but in case it can be installed then I rather have it when its not needed - than need it and not have it.

It does not have to tpfand, but that one is nice because of the GUI - so do you know of any such program for 16.04 64bit?

JBJ

thinkfan - simple and lightweight fan control program

requires you install
lm-sensors - utilities to read temperature/voltage/fan sensors

And, perhaps, requires adding the following line to /etc/modprobe.d/thinkpad_acpi.conf:

options thinkpad_acpi fan_control=1

(Perhaps that's not required on Ubuntu, or it may be a different file.)

For anyone looking for same solution, here is a guide:
Requirements

* Python 2.7
* DBus, GTK+, libglade and GNU gettext with bindings for Python
* pkexec to obtain superuser privileges
Ubuntu users need to install the package python-gobject

Download
https://github.com/tpfanco/tpfancod
https://github.com/tpfanco/tpfanco-admin

then extract the files to a temporary folder

Go to the tpfancod-master folder and open a terminal, then run this command

sudo make install-systemd

Then

sudo systemctl enable tpfancod

Reboot your laptop


Then in terminal run

systemctl status tpfancod

Close the terminal window if everything ok, if not then go to https://github.com/tpfanco/tpfancod/issues and file the issue

Now open the tpfanco-admin-master folder

Open a terminal and run

sudo make install

then

Reboot your laptop

Open a terminal and run

tpfanco-admin_polkit

Reboot once more and you can find tpfanco-admin in Applications>Settings

You have to type your password for it to work.

Hope this helps someone

JBJ

Now I just have to figure out why the fan RPM levels is reported so high - In idle the fan is reported as 5731 rpm level 255 which is hwctrl it should be something like 2000 and full fan speed is reported as 10151 rpm level 256 which should be something like 5000 - very strange.

Maybe someone here can explain this.

JBJ