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There is an ice pack on my laptop.
#234990 - 09/29/10 12:56 PM
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Well, it's not as if I usually read the fine print on these things, so maybe I missed seeing "ice pack" in the list of hardware requirements for Linux Live 9, but anyway, if it isn't in the list, it ought to be.
Up until a few days ago, this laptop was a Windows machine. It used to work fine (well, kind of; what do you expect from Windows?), but then it got to the point where it was too slow for me to play not only my favorite MAME games but also browser-based Flash games. I am not by any means rich, so I said "screw it, I'm installing Linux", and that's what I did. First I started with Ubuntu. It was almost impossible to do much of anything. I couldn't even get wireless Internet to work. Then I figured, I had nothing to lose, so I started over again with Linux Live 9. At first, no real problems, hey, it even found the right drivers for my wireless Internet for me, really cool, but now I find I can't do squat with it. Even if I use the built-in program for software updates, it is very difficult to find software that actually works. Somehow I got a version of MAME running on this machine, but for some reason it wouldn't recognize the enter key. (With Ubuntu, it wouldn't recognize the up arrow or the enter key, but it recognized the down arrow and letter and number keys just fine.) So no MAME games. And even if I stick to Internet games (that's about all that works), the machine overheats after a few hours.
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Re: There is an ice pack on my laptop.
[Re: amused]
#234996 - 09/29/10 03:04 PM
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Hours? If I'm lucky, I'll be able to hit continue and post this.
(busted fan on laptop)
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| Sune |
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Connected
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Reged: 09/21/03
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Posts: 5648
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Loc: Lagoa Santa, Brasil
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Re: There is an ice pack on my laptop.
[Re: TriggerFin]
#235022 - 09/29/10 07:40 PM
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> Hours? If I'm lucky, I'll be able to hit continue and post this.
>
> (busted fan on laptop)
Can also be ACPI issues, many manufacturers write the BIOS ACPI tables so that they only (barely) work with Windows. I heard HP's ACPI code is especially horrid. In extreme cases that means no fan control and no CPU power stepping under Linux, resulting in shorter battery life and of course overheating.
It's possible this could be fixed in the latest BIOS so try updating. If you have "ACPI 2.0" and "ACPI APIC" settings in the BIOS, try enabling them.
If it's a fairly popular laptop chances are good that there are community provided, patched ACPI tables available for it. You can then use the Grub boot loader to load and inject the patched ACPI tables, overriding the built-in ones, making power management work again. I've seen forums where these mythical patched ACPI tables are shared. You're looking for DSDT and possibly SSDT tables.
I think there are also various boot-time flags you can experiment with that will let Linux handle Power Management in different ways.
Try googling Laptop-model + ACPI + Linux.
S
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Re: There is an ice pack on my laptop.
[Re: Sune]
#235087 - 09/30/10 05:39 AM
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Nah, it's an old laptop that crapped out on Windows back a ways. The fan stopped back then. Tried to open it up to see if it just needed cleaning or maybe had a loose wire, but couldn't get at it.
Stable now... I hit up the BIOS and turned off SpeedStep, which, rather than stopping it from stepping down, causes it to be permanently stepped down to half the normal 1.5GHz, where it stays cool enough to avoid the emergency power-cut.
So now I just can't run anything on it. :/
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