Debian Lenny, FreeBSD 7, OpenBSD and silencing CPU fans

Quick notes because I've got time for no more:

Debian Lenny: I hadn't updated Debian Lenny in about a week. Bugs are getting fixed all over the place. The latest wave of upgrades includes a couple of fixes for the Epiphany browser, which as a result is running better than ever. Most of what I noticed was cosmetic, but it just adds to the excellent functionality that Lenny already offers users. If you've been worried about running Lenny instead of Etch, I think the time is right to move to Lenny as it makes its way from Testing to Stable.

Preload in Debian: After reading about preload in Linux Journal, I finally installed it. Preload is supposed to monitor what apps you use most and automatically load them into memory, adjusting if your application habits change. Since I tend to run the same apps a lot, and since I have plenty of memory, I'm anxious to see how well preload works.

FreeBSD and the need for speed: FreeBSD 7 is now beginning its life as a stable OS. It's supposed to be up 15 percent faster than the fastest Linux kernels, up to 350 percent faster than FreeBSD 6x under normal loads, and up to 1,500 percent faster under heavy loads. I'm anxious to see how the hardware recognition performs. So far, I've had quite a bit of luck with DesktopBSD 1.6, which is based on FreeBSD 6, and I can only hope for better things with FreeBSD 7, which I plan to test soon.

OpenBSD update: I've been having a lot of fun -- and learning quite a bit -- with OpenBSD. I have the box on the local network, and I've been playing around with the ftp server, Apache Web server and with SSH. First I installed the PuTTY ssh client on my Windows XP box so I could connect from the XP box to the OpenBSD box. I could run any console program I wanted, and while it may not be a huge deal to the more experienced of you out there, it's a huge deal for me.

I wanted to run X over SSH, so I made the appropriate changes in OpenBSD to allow X11 forwarding over SSH. Ahd with the help of my friends over at LXer, I found out about Xming, an X client for Windows.

It took me awhile to figure out that I had to enable X in PuTTY to make it work. Xming runs in the background on the Windows box, and when I open an X program from the PuTTY console:

$ rox &

... A window opens on my XP desktop with the OpenBSD X program in it (which, in the case of the line above, is the Rox-filer). Pretty slick. (The & after the app name makes the process run in the background. I had one snag: I couldn't run the Dillo browser over SSH until I installed all the X fonts for Xming. There's a way to just use Xming to enable the SSH session, but that hasn't worked for me thus far. But since the PuTTY/Xming combination is working, that's what I'm going with.

I'd like to run a full X session with a full window manager running in a window on my XP box, but besides being slower than running single apps, I get the feeling that such a thing isn't exactly looked upon lovingly by the hard-core Unix geeks out there.

But being able to run any OpenBSD (or Linux) app on a network-connected box from a Windows-only PC is so totally cool that I should be sated in my dose of geekdom for the next week at least.

The $0 Laptop and its CPU fan discontents: I've been working with controlling my Gateway Solo 1450's CPU fan for months now. In Linux, I've had it controlled pretty well with a cron job, and in the case of Puppy a few added kernel modules.

But since then, I've come to realize that the cron job, which checked the CPU temperature every five minutes and turned the fan on or off depending on that temperature, is unnecessary.

All you need to do is turn the fan off at boot, and then ACPI will manage it just fine. This revelation comes after considerable work in the console, checking the temperature, running commands, running scripts and generally seeing what happens during the course of a computing session.

So I turned off my cron jobs, and now all I need to do is add the following line to /etc/rc.local:

echo 3 > /proc/acpi/fan/FAN0/state

That turns the fan off. I initially thought that only this line -- echo 0 > /proc/acpi/fan/FAN0/state -- would turn the CPU fan back on, but that is most definitely not the case. Once the fan is turned off with the "echo 3" command (which you can run from the console, just as you can the "echo 0" line), when the CPU gets warm, the fan turns on and then turns off when the CPU cools down.

So that one line added to /etc/rc.local is enough to get ACPI management of the fan working, at least in the Gateway Solo 1450.

Now there's the matter of OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD and this same CPU fan. So far nothing has worked, but I will keep trying.