acpi=off

I recently got myself a nice new Philips x60 laptop. Being a huge fan of the penguin, the first thing I did was to shrink the windows partition right down and install Suse Linux 10.0.

People often complain about the lack of device support in Linux, however Suse supported every device this laptop had, right out of the box. Display, Modem, Wireless LAN, Sound everything. Apart from, it would seem, the laptops cooling system.

After a few hours gazing lovingly at my new toy, I noticed that my thighs were starting to get a tad warm. I also noticed the lack of any fan noise. After booting into Windows the fan started up as expected. Oh Dear :(

Panic not! Linux is extremely flexible, and with the help of a few newsgroups / handy blog postings, most problems can be ironed out fairly easily.

ACPI is an interface that allows the operating system to control power management on computers. This includes cooling. Evidently acpi did not support my laptops cooling systems and needed to be disabled. Disabling acpi allows the hardware (BIOS) to manage the cooling. There is an argument that says all power management should be left to the hardware anyway...

To disable acpi in Linux add acpi=off to your kernel arguments. This can be achieved in the configuration of your boot loader (probably GRUB, so grub.conf). In Suse you can use Yast.