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A while ago I started to use thinkfan to control the fan speed of my lenovo thinkpad. This became necessary as it stoped working after a kernel update (I think it came with the installation of a v3.7 kernel with xorg-edgers) and I got thermal errors which crashed the system.

Then, with thinkfan installed, my system worked for months. But since yesterday after an update of xorg-edgers (please don't ask my why I have to use that, I really have to) I got thermal crashes again.

At the same time the fan started to make some noise (not that it was running fast, probably rather too slow). Obviously thinkfan stoped working with the new kernel.

Any information available about fan control in recent kernels? Maybe the acpi report of the temperature is wrong now? The thinkfan configuration is as described in http://thinkwiki.de/Thinkfan (it didn't change with the update I think).

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  • Easy suggestion: cant you boot an older kernel while maintaining the functionality of newer packages supplied by xorg-edgers? Jan 14, 2013 at 19:23
  • No. According the ppa instructions they would not work together. Also one of the reasons why I use this ppa (working hibernation) seems to be due to the kernel.
    – highsciguy
    Jan 14, 2013 at 21:09

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I figured out that that the problems I encountered were merely caused by an invisible mechanical contamination of the fan with dust which happened to become critical just after I installed the new kernel. Since I cleaned it no new thermal errors occured and sensors shows that temperatures stay within their bounds. The pages http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_fan_noise and http://www.insidemylaptop.com/replace-cooling-fan-lenovo-thinkpad-t61-laptop/ helped me identifying and fixing the problem.

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