Acer Aspire One fan control

Submitted by gwolf on Sat, 10/04/2008 - 17:57

Almost a month ago, Mauro pointed towards acerfand, a daemon to keep the Acer Aspire One's fan quiet while not needed. Thanks, Mauro, you made my life more pleasant ;-)
Today I had some free time in my hands (of course, putting aside everything else I should be doing), so I decided to un-uglify my machine. I hate having random stuff in /usr/local! So I packaged Rachel Greenham's acerfand for Debian. It should hit unstable soon.
Of course, it will not make it to Lenny - which is a shame, giving how nicely Lenny recognizes everything in this sweet machine. So, I have set up a repository for it - Once the package is formally accepted in Debian, and once lenny-backports comes to life there, I will move it to backports.org. Anyway, you can add this to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://www.iiec.unam.mx/apt/ lenny acer deb-src http://www.iiec.unam.mx/apt/ lenny acer

Note that in the future, this package might provide some more niceties... I decided to -at least for now- stash away acer_ec in /usr/share/acerfand, but it does open a nice window to the AAO's EC(?) registers... And could be useful for many other things.
[Update]: Following Matthew's comments, both on this blog post and on the ITP bug, I am not uploading acerfand to Debian. Still, I'm using the program and find it working fine, and quite useful. You can use it from my personal repository, as written above.

gwolf's blog
8696 reads

( categories:

)

Nasty race conditions

Submitted by Matthew Garrett (not verified) on Sat, 10/04/2008 - 19:52.

Be aware that hitting the EC io ports directly (like the acer_ec.pl script does) means that you're doing so without any locking. If you do that while in the middle of a kernel or firmware ec transaction (or if the firmware preempts you while you're in the middle of running it), it could result in you writing bad values to arbitrary EC ports. Seriously bad things could happen as a result. I really wouldn't recommend putting this in a distribution. It really needs to be a kernel driver.

Umh, I'll take your word for it

Submitted by gwolf on Tue, 10/07/2008 - 04:17.

After all, it would be quite foolish not to listen to you on this topic ;-) Still, I've been using it on my laptop, and will continue to do so (and to offer it on my unofficial apt repo)... But yes, I'll cancel my ITP. Thanks!

Fan apparently controlled by updated BIOS

Submitted by Steve Parker (not verified) on Sun, 10/05/2008 - 22:33.

The new BIOS controls the fan according to temperature, according to the second comment at http://www.aspireoneuser.com/2008/09/17/bios-v3304-acer-aspire-one/

I haven't tried the new BIOS yet, so can't confirm.

No fun with the new BIOS...

Submitted by gwolf on Tue, 10/07/2008 - 04:15.

I just downloaded and installed the newer BIOS version - and it makes no difference, AFAICT. Seems like I'll stick to the acerfand, at least for personal use (although not for Debian at large)

Any updates on the acer fan problem?

Submitted by charlie (not verified) on Sat, 01/17/2009 - 16:20.

Hi, I got Debian installed in my Aspire One a few days ago and run into the bug report about acerfan on the wiki. Do you know if it has been fixed with the newer bios out there (latest is 3309 i think). How has acerfand been working for you?

Works fine for me...

Submitted by gwolf on Mon, 01/19/2009 - 13:39.

I am using acerfand, and it works without a hiccup. Still, following Matthew's comments (which are much better informed than my highest hopes so far), I will _not_ upload it to Debian. Still, you can add my personal repository, as shown in the post body.

thanx for your writing to

Submitted by betsson (not verified) on Sun, 01/25/2009 - 20:10.

thanx for your writing to post, I like your web site and good lucky. Regards.

Fan still noisy

Submitted by Richard (not verified) on Thu, 01/22/2009 - 23:17.

So I'm running Debian unstable on my AA1 (150 model). I tried installing your acerfand package and it didn't work.

I tried re-flashing my BIOS to 3309 and it didn't make any difference to anything.

gwolf: what BIOS version are you on? And what model of AA1 do you have?

Rachel Greenham's page with the scripts seems to be dead. (Though the Livejournal preview thingy seemed to be able to display it all right, maybe it has a cache?)

So when I try and run acerfand nothing happens. If I try:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/acerfand start

$ sudo /usr/sbin/acerfand

it does absolutely nothing. No error messages. No new process. And still a noisy fan.

The Perl script uses two modules called POSIX and Fcntl. Do I need to install anything to get these?

Re: Fan still noisy

Submitted by gwolf on Sat, 01/24/2009 - 14:43.

Yes, reflashing the BIOS didn't work for me.
As said in my post, I have packaged the acerfand script, and it is available in my personal apt repository (I did not and will not upload it to Debian). Please follow the instructions in the post body - It will install all the needed dependencies, and set it to be auto-started (and you can in any case run /etc/init.d/acerfand start).

thanks for information.

Submitted by agel (not verified) on Sat, 02/21/2009 - 10:42.

thanks for information.

I very much enjoyed reading your blog.

Submitted by betsson (not verified) on Tue, 02/17/2009 - 17:27.

I am a frequent visitor of your blog and usually do not leave comments.
Just wanted to let you know that I very much enjoy reading your blog.
Keep it up.
Thanks :)

betsson james

Post new comment

Your name:

E-mail:

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly. If you have a Gravatar account, used to display your avatar.

Homepage:

Subject:

Comment: *

Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
Allowed HTML tags: <br> <b> <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <blockquote> <img> <h1> <h2> <h3> <tt> <pre> <strike>
Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
Use <bib>citekey</bib> or [bib]citekey[/bib] to insert automatically numbered references.
Use [fn]...[/fn] (or <fn>...</fn>) to insert automatically numbered footnotes.
You can enable syntax highlighting of source code with the following tags: <code>, <blockcode>. Beside the tag style "<foo>" it is also possible to use "[foo]".

More information about formatting options

CAPTCHA

This question is for testing whether you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.