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I installed Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon over Windows 8 recently on an Acer Aspire E1-570.

http://www.acer.com.au/ac/en/AU/content/model/NX.MEPSA.004

Everything seems to be working fine, however I notice that my fan seems to be on at high speed a lot of the time.

Can someone please tell me definitive troubleshooting steps that are relevant to this distro.

Also if there are commands that I can run to get the relevant system information required to troubleshoot the issue it would be great to know these too.

Edit

In case it is relevant, the screen brightness applet control wasn't working so I followed steps below - perhaps that altered something?

me@computer ~ $ ls /sys/class/backlight/
acpi_video0 intel_backlight
sudo touch /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf
sudo gedit /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-intel.conf

and then added this to the file:

Section "Device"
Identifier "card0"
Driver "intel"
Option "Backlight" "intel_backlight"
BusID "PCI:0:2:0"EndSection

http://itsfoss.com/fix-brightness-ubuntu-1310/

Sensors also seems to be mentioned in other posts so I typed it into the command and this was the output:

me@computer ~ $ sensors
coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Physical id 0: +44.0°C (high = +87.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)
Core 0: +44.0°C (high = +87.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)
Core 1: +44.0°C (high = +87.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)

More System Information

me@computer ~ $ cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_governor
ondemand

me@computer ~ $ inxi -Fxz
System: Host: computer Kernel: 3.13.0-24-generic x86_64 (64 bit, gcc: 4.8.2) 

Right-click > "Open image in new tab" to see image at full size.

I just ran in similar difficulties on a different computer model, perhaps what follows can helps you but it may be different on your computer.

You may check for the cooling device state of the fan. This script will show the cooling devices names, types and status.

for a in /sys/devices/virtual/thermal/cooling_device*
do 
 echo $(basename $a) $(cat $a/type) $(cat $a/cur_state)
done

On my computer :

cooling_device0 Fan 0
cooling_device1 Fan 0
cooling_device2 Fan 0
cooling_device3 Fan 1
cooling_device4 Fan 1
cooling_device5 Processor 0
cooling_device6 Processor 0
cooling_device7 LCD 0

In real there is only one fan on my computer. The cooling_device* Fan are different vue of the same fan.

This is how it works on my computer :

When /sys/class/thermal/cooling_device4/cur_state is set to 1 the fan management is activated. The other /sys/class/thermal/cooling_device[0123]/cur_stat will see their value automatically changing from 0 to 1 depending on the temperature.

For instance at 60°C cooling_device3/cur_statet is set to 1.

When /sys/class/thermal/cooling_device4/cur_state is set to 0 the thermal management is stopped. The fan is stopped and when the computer reach 80°C the fan is run at high speed until the computer cools down to bellow 50°C.

This is what I do to activate the thermal management:

echo 1 > /sys/class/thermal/cooling_device4/cur_state

Forcing 1 to the other cooling_devices* Fan had no effect.

I put it in a service to have it activated at boot and after a "suspend/resume".

• 
  Don't force the status on the non Fan devices I don't know what it can do.


• If you change a Fan state, monitor the temperature at different activity level