How to deliberately activate cooling fan of laptop?

Question

Hi I have a laptop (Fujitsu Siemens Amilo 4000), I'd like to control the cooling fan manually. How do I do that? /proc/acpi/fan/ is empty, the fan is otherwise working well.

Distro is Fedora 14.

Answer 1

The fujitsu_laptop module dans control acpi for Fujitsu-Siemens laptops does not appear to have fan control code (as of today) see:

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=blob;f=drivers/platform/x86/fujitsu-laptop.c

(You can look at the thinkpad acpi code in the same directory, it has a fan subdriver)

I don't think it's possible to achieve what you want to do with your hardware.

Answer 2

I would look at the sys devices directory. For example, in Sony Vaio laptops, you can turn on the fan to max speed with this command:

while [ 1 ] ; do echo "255" > /sys/devices/platform/sony-laptop/fanspeed; sleep 0.1; done

In your laptop, try doing a:

find /sys/devices/platform/ -name "*fan*"

or manually inspect the directory using tree, looking for something that refers to fan speed:

tree /sys/devices/platform | less