[CentOS] Overheating on laptop as compared to RHEL

Sun Sep 15 12:56:12 UTC 2013
Krishnan V <v.srikrishnan at gmail.com>

On Sat, Sep 14, 2013 at 9:11 PM, Ned Slider <ned at unixmail.co.uk> wrote:

> On 14/09/13 16:23, Krishnan V wrote:
> > Hi,
> >   I have an acer 5738g laptop on which i tried out the centos6.4 live CD.
> > The laptop feels noticable hotter and i check the temperature using
> > something like cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/. The temperatures are around
> > 57-60 degrees when the laptop is just idling, ie, just the desktop and
> the
> > terminal window open. I install lm_sensors using yum and it installs
> > successfully, but there is no noticable reduction in temperature. I have
> > faced this same problem using different varities of gnu/linux
> > distributions: slackware, lubuntu, mandriva and now centos. By a freak
> > chance, i had a chance to run RHEL 5.4 and to my great surprise, the
> > temperature at idling was 43, similar to Windows(which came as default).
> In
> > fact, the temperature control by rhel was what made me think of trying
> > centos. I tried the lm_sensors configuration on rhel and it was not even
> > able to load the correct modules, yet the temperature control was better.
> > Now, i am not sure if lmsensors are for detecting temperatures only but
> > also for cotrolling temperature.
>
> lm_sensors is indeed for monitoring only. Further, different drivers
> will report different temps so you need to be very careful you are not
> comparing apples with oranges. Even the same driver (e.g, coretemp) can
> report different temps depending if it's an old version in el5 vs a
> newer version in el6. Temperatures are generally relative so monitoring
> is useful to see if the temp goes up or down, but don't necessarily take
> the values as absolute.
>
Ok. thanks for the explanation. In my case, there was perceptible
temperature difference.

>
> > I am also aware that this particular model is notorious for heating
> > problems, and there are suggestions for cutting case for better air flow.
> > However, i do not want to try this solution, but the temperature control
> > by rhel gave me some hope! Posibly i am wrong.
> > If anyone has a suggestion, or needs more information, pl. let me know.
>
> Generally newer distro's (and/or kernels) will have better power
> management and thus should allow lower temps. I doubt running a LiveCD
> is the best way to evaluate a distro's power management performance,
> although I could be wrong.
>
I think you are right, however I had tried Lubuntu about a month back with
no luck. I want to install only after i see some difference.
Thanks for  your response.

>
>
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS at centos.org
> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
>