Temperatures, voltages and fan speeds, oh my!

A while back, my mother actually asked me to install Kubuntu/KDE4 on their -- my parents' -- compy when she saw all the cool things it could do. KDE 4 itself runs just fine, but 'problem is, Linux likes to ramp the fan up and down. Enter the famous lm-sensors. I knew it was supposed to give you sensor "support," but I didn't know to what extent - until now. lm-sensors doesn't come installed on Kubuntu by default, so you gotta install it via, well, I would say Adept, but honestly, 3.0 is a hunk of junk. It can't do nearly the same stuff as the old one could. Anyway, one way or another, get the packge lm-sensors installed and run sensors-detect from a terminal. Setting this whole thing up was not as easy as the rest of the distro. Not by a longshot. It asked a bunch of questions about whether or not to probe the subset of buses and what not, almost all of which you'd say yes to if you ran it; The last 2 or so are ones you might want to answer differently to, depending on your degree of experience. After having ran it, modprobed the modules it listed at the end and running sensors to check and see if it was working, I had a readout of what was going on with temps, volts and fan speeds.

Temperatures, voltages and fan speeds, oh my!
Temperatures, voltages and fan speeds, oh my!
Temperatures, voltages and fan speeds, oh my!

Moving right along, the next step was to configure the fan speeds. Never before have I felt stupid trying to make my fan speed adjust. Well, there's a first time for everything, so I got to learn about "Pulse-Width Modulation" while using pwmconfig in order to make my parents' fans adjust dynamically according to the temperature of the chips using fancontrol. After multiple tries and multiple failures -- including a few incidences of "fan stoppage" -- I finally got the northbridge fan to calm down until it hits ~50C. Then, in theory, it ramps up to 100% until it hits 30C, ad nauseum. The funny thing is, I couldn't test it fully because they were already going to sleep. Let alone get the other three fans working. That's how ridiculously long this all took.

If you want *real* step-by-step instructions on how to do this, there's a nice thread on the Ubuntu Forums that still works on Ibex (wtf is an Ibex anyway?). I warn you now tho, only attempt it with low blood pressure and low stress :) Wow.

On the bright side of things, I was surfing around and randomly stumbled upon this really nifty plasmoid to control (at the time of writing) newer ATi video card fan speeds and read GPU temps. The best part, I never saw an official statement in the driver release notes that said my card was supported. But, the fan control driver feature actually works for my card[1]! And with ease!

Cheers,
-DHG

[1]My current video card is the HD3870X2 by Sapphire. It's a pretty damn good card, if I do say so. Rest of the specs are below for those interested: