I’m a long time Linux user, and have recently started noticing that my development laptop’s fans never throttle up or down based on the workload. I’m running Linux Mint 17.2 on my old ThinkPad Edge E320, and I’ve noticed the problem to have existed in Ubuntu 14.04 to 15.04 as well.
Tinkering about, and rummaging through the ThinkPad’s various support forums and pages online led me to tpfan-admin, a GUI based fan controller that uses the thinkpad_acpi module in Linux.
I had previously tried using almost all solutions under ThinkWiki to no avail. But tpfan-admin sounded promising from the very start because it mentioned the thinkpad_acpi module, which I knew for a fact controlled a lot of hardware switches on my E320.
Additionally, getting tpfan-admin is as simple as adding a PPA to the Ubuntu repo list, and updating apt-get. You have to get tpfan-admin and tpfand which is the daemon that actually monitors temp using sensors and controls the fan. tpfan-admin is just the GUI to set the fan throttling profile.
Installation Steps
Open up a Terminal of a Debian based distro and enter the following -
That should install tpfan-admin. Make sure to restart your system at this point to load the changes, otherwise trying to run tpfan-admin will throw error messages.
Running TpFan-Admin
Run as super user through Terminal -
sudo tpfan-admin
This is the GUI. Tick manual control if thats what you’re after and drag and click on the sliders to set boundaries and fan activity (0%-100%, with 100% being maximum fan speed). You can split regions on the slider to fine tune the fan speed for different temperature boundaries.
Now my ThinkPad fans whirr up a and down as the workload increases/decreases appropriately. I can actually hear the fan spin up a storm when I pushed it to 100% using tpfan-admin! Success!
Additional Resources:
I had to manually configure the thermal profile for my Laptop as the default hardware based automatic controlling was horrible. Apparently this is a SandyBridge issue for Intel Processors/Motherboards and a German Forum gives a patch for tpfan to automatically adjust SandyBridge hardware temperature monitoring -
