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.

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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)

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