[Debian-eeepc-devel] Fan do not start

[Ben Armstrong]

On 04/30/2010 10:31 AM, Christian Grube wrote:
> Hi @ all,
>
> my Asus eeepc 1001ha under squeeze does not start the Fan.
> He halt after reaching 88°C.
> Is it possible to do something here, but I know the fan is allready working.
>
> Greetings and thanks in advance for the answere
>    

If I were a betting man, I would put money on the problem being 
physical.  I have successfully unblocked fans in two different eeepcs.  
In each case, a small piece of foreign matter (bits of plastic) had 
wedged in the fan, stopping it.  After careful disassembly of the eeepc 
(beware that this may void your warranty; see eeeuser.com forums for 
some pictorial guides for how to do this) I took apart the fan, located 
the foreign matter, dislodged it, reassembled everything, and it has all 
been fine ever since.

But just in case it really is software ...

Debian, and the Debian Eee PC project does not do anything by default to 
implement software control of the fan.  The unit ships with 
firmware-driven fan control which is not turned off unless *you* do 
something to turn it off.

Can you get the fan to start with another OS?  If not, the problem is 
almost certainly physical.  However, if the fan works under another OS 
but fails with Squeeze, without you having done anything to disable or 
attempt to modify fan control (see below) please let us know!  This 
should never happen.

Have you made any attempts at software control of the fan, as per the 
*unsupported*, user contributed tips here?

http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC/TipsAndTricks#SoftwareControlofthefanspeed

If so, try undoing whatever you did.

Have you installed any non-Debian-supplied software on this system that 
might have something to do with fan control, such as eee-control, an 
eee-specific control application that does some (in my opinion, risky) 
direct control of the hardware, bypassing the normal kernel interfaces?

If so, try removing or disabling the software and its configuration.

Regards,
Ben