questions on macbookpro 6,2: temp sensors, nvidia display, boot errors

[Alejandro Castanaza]

Hi.

I have recently installed Ubuntu Maverick 10.10 in my macbookpro 6,2 (15 inch i5). (OS X is ok, but I like Ubuntu very much, besides, being used to Ubuntu, I found some OS X peculiarities very annoying).

It works ok, I followed the instructions in the mactel support wiki for mbp 6,2 maverick.

But, there are some things I'm still in doubt:
1-When I installed the packages for the apple sensors from the mactel support team, the install asked if the hard drive temperature sensor should run as a daemon or not, it sugested: "in doubt, select no", so i selected the option to not run as a daemon. The wiki did not specify anything about this. Should hddtemp be run as a daemon? what is the recommended setting?

2-The laptop becomes hotter than when using OS X, and macfanctld is installed as told in the wiki. Is there anything else that can be done about it?

3- I have the nvidia driver running as recommended, but the plymouth splash becomes very ugly (a known issue since lucid). There is a "fix" for this, also very known: install v86d, and add some settings in /etc/grub and other files. Is it ok to set this fix to the macbook pro? Or is it not recommended due to the integrated intel gpu?

4- When booting, the system outputs some error messages:
could not load /lib/modules/2.6.35-23-generic/modules.dep: No such file or directory
could not load /lib/modules/2.6.35-23-generic/modules.dep: No such file or directory
intel ips 0000:00:1f.6: failed to get i915 symbols, graphics turbo disabled
intel ips 0000:00:1f.6: request irq failed, aborting

is there some way to fix this errors? should be ignored?

Thanks in advance

Alejandro

[Alejandro Castanaza]

to bump this thread, I will anwer my own question number 2. I found that the macfanctl has a manual page (man macfanctl) in which the author has put useful information for tweaking the settings of cooling.
This way, I changed some of the default settings, and the laptop now runs cooler.
The other three questions, I kindly ask if someone can help me.
Thank you.

Alejandro

[apfejes]

to bump this thread, I will anwer my own question number 2. I found that the macfanctl has a manual page (man macfanctl) in which the author has put useful information for tweaking the settings of cooling.
This way, I changed some of the default settings, and the laptop now runs cooler.

Hi Alejandro,

I'm running the same setup as you, and really appreciate your comments. Would you be willing to share what changes you've made to the macfanctl settings? I'm not sure what changes are worth making, and it sounds like you've already done some optimization on this problem.

Thanks!

[ArtificialMusik]

Hello Alejandro,
I have the same Macbook pro you have, (6,2 15 ((i7)) and for some crazy reason I can't get the wifi to work. What is/was your solution?

[ld9828]

hi,

also have ubuntu running on a Macbook pro 6,2 with i7.
how is your battery live in average? I get 4h at max.

@Alejandro Castanaza and apfejes
how did you solve the problem with getting to hot? can you give me a short introduction? would be great!

[Alejandro Castanaza]

well, the macfanctld settings are to keep an average of 45 to 55 degrees, and the cpu and gpu temperature sensors in the range of 50 to 58 degrees.
Simply editing the macfanctld.conf file to lower those vales, for instance, 5 degrees less on each of the limits, makes the daemon to raise the fans higher to try to keep the macbook cooler.
Still, the mac os x posibly makes many more things to operate more efficiently, what makes the macbook not only to run cooler, but the battery to last more. It uses the intel integrated graphics if not using too much graphics power, and turns off the nvidia gpu, which consumes more power, and I think it maybe even turns off some other components, which makes it so efficient.
If that is true, in Linux I don't think there are, yet, those optimizations, and that is why at most, we get up to 4 hours battery life, and the fans run faster and louder than in the mac os x to run just as cool.

[Alejandro Castanaza]

Hi. Well, I did not have any problems with wifi. Just installed the propietary drivers as told in the ubuntu mactel documentation. You should check in the propietary drivers if the Broadcom drivers for the wifi card are installed.

[beaufils]

Did some of you try to upgrade to 11.04 (Natty) under MacBookPro6,2 ?

I upgraded and then, for independent reasons, I was force to reinstall from scratch and get a lot of trouble with heat control. My MacbookPro6,2 is going really hot since that reinstallation (can not let it on my laps).

For instance macfanctld is not available in the ppa repository for Natty (the one of maverick did not seem to be able to control fans unless you also install apple-smc-dkms from maverick ppa), the nvidia-bl-dkms package available does not control really the LCD backlight (I had to install the mbp-nvidia-bl-dkms from maverick to control it actually) ?

Did some of you make some modifications in the xorg.conf in order to cool the NVIDIA GPU ?

[alexmurray]

1-When I installed the packages for the apple sensors from the mactel support team, the install asked if the hard drive temperature sensor should run as a daemon or not, it sugested: "in doubt, select no", so i selected the option to not run as a daemon. The wiki did not specify anything about this. Should hddtemp be run as a daemon? what is the recommended setting?

If not running in daemon mode, programs like sensors-applet will not be able to use hddtemp to query the hdd temperature - however sensors-applet now has support for using udisks so you can probably safely leave this as 'No' - saying 'Yes' simply means hddtemp will run in the background and allow you to query it for temperatures over a local network socket (which is what say sensors-applet does). If you want to enable it in daemon mode, you should be able to run the following:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure hddtemp

2-The laptop becomes hotter than when using OS X, and macfanctld is installed as told in the wiki. Is there anything else that can be done about it?

Sounds like you solved this already.

3- I have the nvidia driver running as recommended, but the plymouth splash becomes very ugly (a known issue since lucid). There is a "fix" for this, also very known: install v86d, and add some settings in /etc/grub and other files. Is it ok to set this fix to the macbook pro? Or is it not recommended due to the integrated intel gpu?

Yes this should be fine to use this fix on the MacBook Pro - I use it on my mine (although mine is a 5,1 not 6,2).

4- When booting, the system outputs some error messages:
could not load /lib/modules/2.6.35-23-generic/modules.dep: No such file or directory
could not load /lib/modules/2.6.35-23-generic/modules.dep: No such file or directory
intel ips 0000:00:1f.6: failed to get i915 symbols, graphics turbo disabled
intel ips 0000:00:1f.6: request irq failed, aborting
is there some way to fix this errors? should be ignored?

The first two should be fine to ignore. The second two appear to be that the integrated intel GPU is not initializing, which is to be expected since the discrete NVIDIA GPU is the only one enabled as far as I know when booting Ubuntu so this can also safely be ignored.

[Alejandro Castanaza]

thank you for taking the time to answer all the questions.
I'll try the plymouth fix and come back if something happens. The text plymouth is uglier than the low resolution ubuntu logo that appeared in lucid.