Why is my fan crazy in Ubuntu but cool and calm in Mint?

[ufugu]

I've been on a distrohopping spree lately, and in the process I have been back and forth between Ubuntu 11.10 (with Unity removed and gnome-shell installed) and stock Linux Mint 12 (based on 11.10). I've had fresh installs of both two times each.

Both work great on my laptop (Inspiron i15-RN5110, Core i3 and onboard Intel graphics) EXCEPT that with Ubuntu the fan will regularly go nuts. I run top in the terminal and nothing will be eating cpu, but they fan will be going crazy and then go back down again. The laptop is not hot but it definitely feels a little warm.

With Mint, the laptop is cool and the fan runs low.

The riddle I want to solve is if Mint is based on this same version of Ubuntu, what are they doing to make it run so cool and calm? For various reasons not relevant here, I'd prefer to keep running Ubuntu if I can solve this (if not I'll have to go back to Mint).

[JC Cheloven]

Hi, I'm not able to answer your question (probably acpi related but anyway), but I'm pretty sure you'd get more answers if you post this in a support subforum as "hardware and laptops".

I'd rewording the whole thing as a fan problem, with a minor mention to Mint's behaviour in the body of your post. Good luck!

[mips]

Mint might have a newer kernel or applied a kernel patch.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTA1MzY
https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/ker...hangeLog-3.2.5

You can also try this in Ubuntu http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1920148

[shuttleworthwannabe]

@OP--try mips suggestions and let us know if it worked. Also you may want to test out the alpha daily build of 12.04 LTS--apparently kernel patching is done as a backport I believe (from 3.3.x); I am usingit now on m vostro 3700, and must admit, I have not had my laptop this cool and quiet!

Let us know what happens?