Still tinkering away with Ubuntu Hardy Heron on the Thinkpad X60. Since my last posting, Ubuntu updated their kernel to 2.6.24-16, and the corresponding modules package has a newer iwl3945 driver (version 1.2.0, though compat-wireless has 1.2.23). The wireless on this machine appears to work out of the box now. I suspended and resumed a few more times, and that appears to work fine as well.
The only last remaining show-stopper is the heat. This laptop’s thin design means when its insides get hot, you can really feel it in your hands. In particular, many internet postings note that the right half of the wrist rest area tends to heat up.
In addition to what I mentioned in my last post, I’ve learned a few new tricks. For example, to set the power saving setting on the hard drive:
sudo hdparm -B 250 /dev/sda
The value can be anywhere from 0-255. The higher the value, the more power saving. Apparently 255 can have some issues with parking the drive heads too often to wear out the drive, so 250 is the compromise (I’m sure there aren’t actually 255 distinct settings, but it seems like setting 255 is the important part.)
To get a good read on the temperature of the drive, use the hddtemp utility:
sudo apt-get install hddtemp sudo hddtemp /dev/sda
With a value of 250, my drive appears to warm up to about 36C and then stay around that level. That’s about body temperature, so it doesn’t feel particularly warm. Making sure to run hdparm seems to keep things a bit cooler.
I’ve set the fan to run at max cooling (using the thinkpad_acpi module in experimental mode), and the followed all the tricks detailed at Intel’s LessWatts site. After all this, the CPU temperature hovers under less than 38C, but my mini-PCI sensor still tells me that it’s between 41C and 42C, which I can definitely feel.
I even went so far as to track down this image (courtesy of PC Watch), that shows the board layout of the x60. It’s that big black chip in the middle that’s getting hot. Unfortunately, form the image I can’t tell what that chip is, and I don’t really feel like dissecting my laptop. If anyone has any idea what that chip is let me know. But my current working theory is that there is some other power management setting that should be tweak-able, but it’s just not available on Linux at this point in time.
Oh well, back to Windows.
