[Bug 6554] Fan control on Amilo A1655G: WORKAROUND

[Richard Milne]

Oh, sweet blessed relief!

Thanks to the observations made above, and from the discussion on the
forums http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=41927, I was able to
cobble together the following workaround TO MAKE MY #*!$ FAN SHUT UP! I,
too, have the problem that, on my Amilo A1655G laptop, (with Dapper
Drake) the fan is grinding away from power-up, even though the CPU temp
hasn't had a chance to reach a temperature to warrant it.

The key, as noted above, is to raise the CPU temperature above a pre-
defined trip point, so the OS then manually takes control of the fan.
When the temperature then drops again, the OS will turn the fan off.

I have a gnome applet which tells me my current CPU temp. Say it is
reported at 44°C. I also note, with the following command

cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/trip_points

That my predefined trip points are the following:

critical (S5):           105 C
passive:                 76 C: tc1=3 tc2=1 tsp=150 devices=0xc17de620
active[0]:               67 C: devices=0xf6e59460
active[1]:               57 C: devices=0xf6e593e0

So, I want to set the trip points to just above my current operating
temperature. I do this with the following sequence of commands

sudo -s
echo -n "105:0:76:46:45" > /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/trip_points
exit

Then I try and do some heavy work - move the mouse around alot, load
massive images in the GIMP, and so on. CPU temperature rises, both fans
kick in.

Then I set the trip points back to their previous values:

sudo -s
echo -n "105:0:76:67:57" > /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/trip_points
exit

(Note the order of the values given above)

At the next polling interval
(/proc/acpi/thermal_zone/THRM/polling_frequency) the OS will see that
the temperature is below the threshold, and turn the fan off.

I'm sure other readers can come up with a more elegant solution to this
problem. Note that I tried the init script listed in the forum link
above, and it didn't work for me. Apart from whether it's the right
approach for my machine or not, isn't there a bug in the script? I'm not
too familiar with bash, but should there be a closing bracket in the
following lines?

case "$i" in
        critical|hot|passive|active0|active1)

-- 
fan control does not work at fjs amilo pro v2030
https://launchpad.net/bugs/6554