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I've been using windows my whole life and recently my Windows 10 installation got corrupted and I needed to get a new one so I chose the free Ubuntu. It's very different from windows and frustrating to try to learn how to do things when everything was so much simpler on Windows.

As for my fan--On windows I was able to use SpeedFan to easily change what fan speeds I wanted my computer to have at whatever time I needed it to change by just clicking on some arrows. It was important because of FPS in the games I play changed based on my CPUs temperature.

I've read many threads that mention lm-sensors and fancontrol including How to control fan speed and I've tried following along to install these but using the terminal is very weird and I don't think I did it correctly because the fan seemed to get stuck at maximum speed and I didn't know how to change it. So I completely reinstalled Ubuntu and I'm trying again. Is there any way to do this without using lm-sensors or fancontrol? Also, the linked thread I don't believe adequately explains how to manually change the current fan speed, only to set a range of speeds for automatic change.

Please help my newbie self.

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    ^ That thread isn't good enough to solve my problem. I want to be able to change the current fan speed and keep it there at the click of a button.
    – user793022
    Feb 8, 2018 at 21:15

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This is one of those things I wish there was a nice UI for and I think it would be easy to create. One of the advantages of Windows is most motherboard manufacturers create drivers for Windows, and in Linux someone has to reverse engineer it to get it to work. That being said, you will need to determine whether you can get full support for your fans out of the box, or if you need to install additional drivers. It sounds like you already have some fan control.

When you run pwmconfig, do all of your fans that you want to control stop/start when it says they should? If they do, then you should be able to control them. If not, you will have to look into what drivers you need to install to get those fans under your control. I had to do some custom configuration for mine and I still don't have control of my mini fans or my extra thermometers.

When that is done, it will generate an /etc/fancontrol file. Inside of that, take a look at what it generated. It should tell you the paths of each thermometer and fan that is is using for fancontrol. If you were to view /sys/devices/platform/coretemp.0/hwmon/hwmon<#>/temp1_input, you should see the Celsius temp of the first core * 1000. Now view the files that /etc/fancontrol has for the fans (FCFAN). One of mine is /sys/devices/platform/nct6775.656/hwmon/hwmon4/pwm5. You can manually edit this file as root and change the fan speed for that fan. If fancontrol is running, it will just change it back, so make sure it is off. That should be all you need to do to manually control it.

Though I would use caution, keep an eye on your CPU temps when you do this. Also note that the hwmon numbers can change between boots.

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