A problem with the temperature of my laptop - Mageia 1

[Jose_Manuel]

I have a problem with the high temperature of my laptop, model Samsung R522, when I use Mageia. I tried Mageia LiveCD KDE Europe1 and my laptop gradually went up the temperature, I realized it within a few minutes, when I rebooted the computer the fan started to work immediately for a long period of time. I have installed Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04, in both o.s. I haven't had any problem with the temperature, but in the past I installed OpenSuse 11.2 and had exactly the same problem. I thought it's a problem with ATI open source drivers but the fan doesn't work, and obviously that's not the issue. I hope a solution because I actually want to change Ubuntu for Mageia. Apparently Mageia didn't give me any other issue, if I don't take the temperature into consideration this new distribution works properly. Thanks in advance. Regards.

[Jose_Manuel]

I've searched information about this issue, apparently this problem is related to the opensource ATI drivers, even it's possible fglrx drivers don't solve the problem. There is an issue between last kernels of Linux and several ATI cards. OK, I installed fgrlx driver from non-free repositories, now the question is: How can I deactivate the opensource drivers and activate fgrlx drivers? Thanks in advance.

[blas]

Hi, and welcome to the forums!
As nobody answered yet, I try to give it a shot. Unfortunately I don't own an ATI card, but if I want to enable the closed source nvidia drivers, after enabling the non-free repositories I open MCC/hardware/set up the graphical server, there under 'graphic card' I select the correct one (usually it is selected by default) and click next. Then a window appears telling me that there is a proprietary version for my card and asking if I would like to enable it. I bet it is the same with ATI, so you may give it a try.

[Jose_Manuel]

Thank you, Blas. I tested the LiveCD of Mageia, I want to install the DVD 64 bits but I read this BUG 1471. In the last coment Martin wrote:

By "widespread", I really meant "affects all Radeon cards". I agree this is a
serious problem that may put quite a few people off installing Mageia. It
definitely needs to go in the Errata, and I would suggest a note should be
added to the download page to warn Radeon owners to read the Errata.

I have a Radeon in my laptop, has this bug been solved? Apparently this issue has not been solved properly. Maybe I should wait for a review of Mageia, I'm not impatient and a new release/review of Mageia could fix this bug. I’d like to make it clear that I think Mageia is a great distribution and has a great future, but I cannot expect everything works perfectly in the 1st. release.
Regards, Jose Manuel

[martinw]

Hi Jose,

The problem described in bug 1471 is just an installation bug. The fix described in the bug report is just you doing manually what the installer should have done for you automatically. So once you have done the fix, the issue is solved for you unless you have to reinstall Mageia. Hopefully you won't need to reinstall Mageia until Mageia 2 comes out - by which time I expect this bug will have been fixed. So I don't think this is a reason not to install and use Mageia right now.

Back to your original problem. Do the fans ever come on once you've booted Mageia? If not, I suspect your temperature problem lies with the ACPI daemon, not with the graphics driver. If you start the Mageia Control Centre, select the "System" category, then select "Manage system services", are "acpid" and "cpufreqd" both listed in the table, and are they shown as "running".

If your problem is that the fans are running faster or more frequently than you expect, that's a different problem, and we can start looking at other things.

[Jose_Manuel]

Yep. this is beacuse radeon gets loaded from initrd, so in order to get a
working system:


If you add

radeon.modeset=0

to the kernel command line, it will boot without kms

Then when system is booted,

remove the "radeon.modeset=0"

and do a:

bootloader-config --action rebuild-initrds

and it will recreate the initrd with the needed firmwares added

Can anyone explain me these steps more clearly? Thanks in advance.

[martinw]

Are you currently using the ATI open source driver ("radeon") or the closed source driver ("fglrx"). If you are using the open source driver, and your system boots up with the display working, you are almost certainly not affected by bug 1471, and you don't need to do anything. If not, see if this thread explains it better:

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=380