acpi on toshiba laptop
Today I bouht myself a nice shiny new toshiba laptop, Satellite A110-180. It has Intel chipset, dual core centrino 1.66 an more nice goodies.
Already installed MEPIS on it, and it works correctly for 95%. SMP kernel sees two cores, throttling works OK, sound, video, hibernate, wireless, display powersave.... all perfect.
There's just one nagging thingy, that is the fans. They come on every few seconds, and then stop again. Temperature monitoring does not work OK either, so it looks like the board's ACPI implementation is a bit buggy.
If someone can shed some more light on Toshi specific ACPI issues, I'd appreciate it..
Cheers
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I recall seeing a thread
I recall seeing a thread someplace on this very issue, and I believe that the solution was to add a grub parameter of 'acpi=off'; but don't go quoting me on that.
I'll snoop-around and see if I can come-up with something more substantive for you.
"You have two labs?"
"Each has its place. At the university, I try to please the Federal Government. Here, I negotiate with God."
some more info
Thanks Allan,
In the meantime I have discovered some more:
- this machine uses a Phoenix bios instead of Toshiba bios, so I cannot use the toshiba_acpi module
- I get a PCI BIOS BUG #81 report as the first bootline, but mepis boots anyway
- with acpi enabled powersave daemon works OK (hibernate, cpu throttling), but I get no temp reading and the fan kicks in every time the CPU throttles up
- with acpi=off, the fan is on constantly at low speed, but of course powersave daemon is useless
- i tried the open source omnibook module, which loads fine and gives me a cpu temp readout, but other than that no go...
conclusion: I either need to comply with having an improperly functioning laptop, or it gets back to the store. It will probably be the latter..... too bad, it is a nice machine, but not linux friendly...
Newbie or not Newbie, there's always a question
make your choice :)
Hi Carlops,
powersave seems to work for you anyway - the only problem you have is jumping 'on demand' CPU speed. You may force 'powersave' mode instead of 'dynamic' and beleive me - you'll not really feel the difference for daily common tasks. Of course if you'll need to compile something quickly or rip CD/DVD - you simply swich to 'perfomance' mode and warm your chip to max
Also, I don't beleive there is a way to switch your fans completely off (except to remove them
) all you can do to avoid fan noise - is keep your CPU chip as cool as possible, means run on lower speed or work on ice deck 
Rgds,
-dim
things look a lot better
...
I played around a bit and things are looking up...
most importantly I tweaked powersave. instead of polling every 750 milliseconds, I set it to poll every 3 seconds. I also modified some threshold values regarding cpu load, and the machine behaves decently now.
Since it came with win xp installed, I kept it on a 10 Gb partition. When playing around in XP, I noticed the exact same behaviour in the fan, i.e. accelerating and decelerating intermittently, following cpu spikes when moving a window or opening an app.
so, all in all, it works as it should now, except for a number of hotkeys which I couldn't care less about.... Great machine for only 799 euros
Newbie or not Newbie, there's always a question
Toshiba
I have had Toshiba M45-S331 since March 2005 -- I like it.
Best linux compatibility is Lenovo (IBM) and HP
Best build quality is Lenovo and Toshiba, of course Toughbook and similar if you can afford ...
There may be a BIOS upgrade for your Toshiba but I don't think it addresses the problems you are seeing
The buttons for playing CDs and DVDs without booting initiate a small Linux distro, not compatible with GRUB -- if you want those to work you need to set up dual boot from the Windows boot loader
http://www.mepis.org/docs/en/index.php/Boot_Mepis_from_the_Windows_MBR
Mike