RH wierd one

Eric Eisenhart eric at nblug.org
Fri Jan 24 08:54:28 PST 2003


On Thu, Jan 23, 2003 at 08:30:24PM -0800, Sue Bennett wrote:
> First of all, my machine is a Sony Vaio 650 (not a loptop) that 
> is about 1 year old.  I have set the machine up as dual bootable 
> with Linux and the Windows XP that came on the machine.  As this 
> machine boots up a fan? comes on in "high" gear.   This occurs 
> with both Linux and XP.   After the system comes up completely 
> this fan noise goes into "low" gear in Windows.   It also 
> quieted down when my machine was running SuSE but with RH it  
> stays in "high" gear until the system is shut down.
> 
> At first I thought it might be the CD/RW or the CD/DVD drive 
> spinning.  Someone at work suggested I open both trays at once 
> and see if the noise stopped.  Negitive.  

My best guess: it's the CPU fan which starts up in "high gear" and goes down
to "low gear" if it's not needed at full speed, and that the APM (errrgg..
or ACPI) module is required to determine the "low gear" (either for the fan
or for the CPU).  There's a tendency for distributions (I haven't tried
RH8.0 out yet) to only include the APM stuff when you're on an actual
laptop, even though APM is at least slightly useful on any ATX system.

Try "modprobe apm" and see if it goes away within a few minutes.

Alternate strategy:
Install the "apmd" package via whatever means RedHat 8.0 uses to make this
easiest.  Make sure it starts at bootup.  Run "service apmd start" and see
if the fan stops.  (give it a few minutes)
-- 
Eric Eisenhart
NBLUG Co-Founder & President Pro Tempore for Life
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org/
eric at nblug.org, IRC: Freiheit at freenode, AIM: falschfreiheit, ICQ: 48217244
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://nblug.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20030124/62ddfb9b/attachment.pgp


More information about the talk mailing list