Eternal Thinker: October 2010

Note: This is a techy post, and may not be of interest to most of the readers. If you're having a laptop and is facing overheating/fan-control problems in Ubuntu, read on.

About two months of hacking into my new Sony Vaio, and the girl is still HOT. Literally. :|

The problem
Performance of Vaio in Ubuntu 10.04 lucid and Windows 7 Home Basic had their inherent differences. One thing that riddled me from the beginning was the overheating while working in Ubuntu.

On battery power, Windows gives a fair 4 hours time, whereas Ubuntu cuts it down to less than 2.5 hours. The CPU fan seems to be restless in Ubuntu even when the laptop is pretty idle, while Windows keeps it calm and cool.

Analysis
So after Ubuntu started making much noise last day, I went deeper into the topic.

The CPU temperature in Windows can be checked using Core Temp. Windows managed to keep it around 45°C.

To check temperature in Ubuntu we can install lm-sensors. It even provides us with a panel applet. To my surprise, Ubuntu started out with a temperature of 50°C and it never went lower than this. Rather, in a short while it went up to 55°C. Rebooting the Vaio to Windows dramatically cooled down the CPU. Now there's a bit of trouble!

Sensors applet in Ubuntu - before

Troubleshooting
One of my friends has a Dell laptop, and he said that the situation is just the opposite for him, where Ubuntu is cooler and gives more time on battery. A bit of Googling pointed to more people suffering from the same problem with Vaio and Ubuntu. Obviously I ruled out the situation as a Vaio-Ubuntu thing.

But then a spontaneous thought popped in my mind. There was yet another difference between our laptops - I had a premium graphics card (ATI Radeon HD 5145). A little bit of analysis proved that the problem lies in the driver for the graphics card. We just need to install proprietary drivers rather than open-source ones.

I had installed ATI proprietary drivers as mentioned here in the last part. But the lsmod command showed the radeon module in the list, which meant: Ubuntu is still using the built-in open source radeon module. Which also meant that the above method I used for installing proprietary drivers didn't work correctly - the kernel modules weren't properly installed.
After some trial and error, I figured out how the drivers from ATI can be installed correctly.

Installing proprietary radeon drivers - the proper way
Provided you have downloaded the drivers from the official website, run the following commands:

$ sudo chmod a+x ./ati-driver-installer-10-8-x86.x86_64.run
$ sudo ./ati-driver-installer-10-8-x86.x86_64.run

In the installer window, select Install drivers option, and then Automatic option. After this, run the following commands:

$ sudo aticonfig --initial -f
$ sudo aticonfig --input=/etc/X11/xorg.conf --tls=1

After this, running the lsmod command should give you a list with the fglrx module.

The result
After the proprietary drivers are installed, the graphics during boot are bigger and kind of distorted. But after booting up, everything looks normal. Most importantly, the temperature problem seems to be solved! The starting temperature is now around 40°C :)

Sensors applet in Ubuntu - after

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Windows is still more efficient in power saving than Ubuntu, as far as Vaio is concerned. The problem lies with the power and temperature management in the GPU, rather than the CPU. For this, we can only hope for the day when hardware driver manufacturers show more support towards Ubuntu.

Sometimes I feel it is nice to grow up. To learn new and bigger things, to experience, to travel, to be inspired. Basically, I've been waiting in good hopes for some inspiration to pop up so that I could type in a new post, that too an awesome one, may be. Or a comic, you see, its been a while since I drew up any comic out there.

Life gets busy, life goes monotonous, or life encounters a writer's block. Typical. Oh yeah, life can be typical, too.
And then I have this realization where I see that chances are slim for such a spontaneous inspiration to happen in this busy part of life. I read somewhere, the key in such situations is to see the same things in a different palette. We have to redraw the same inane things on a different canvas using fresher colours, and all of a sudden they get a new life.

So I pack up my textbooks, my hot girl Vaio, and a book which is an anthology of fiction by laureates of the Nobel prize in literature. Then I walked out of my home to get to my grandma's. It was night. It was dark with occasional vague hints of electric light. It was also different, I discovered, to walk through my homeplace at this time. As I said, it was all painted in different colours. There was even a particular smell of night. And the noises were different. There was a sweetly cold wind after the recent rain. There was a different group of people than those I usually find during day time. One old fellow was drunk to his content and was attempting a speech or so in English. After turning a corner, I got an oh-so beautiful picture of the moon hidden in its clouds, high above the high walls around the local industrial firm.

Things aren't quite calm and quiet at Grandma's. For the first part, her audible powers are not working as good as the good ol' times. People should shout at her, and obviously, the TV too. I sat there, watching regular television after quite a while, that too in an impossibly loud volume. If you find any inconsistancies in this post as of yet, let me remind you, this is being typed in front of this same screaming television, with a mix of general gossip from my dear Grandma! My observations are - in a quick review - malayalam serials are still going nowhere, advertisements have got quite creative, and the remaining bunch of silly programs - just like the old times - haven't lost their powers of gluing me to the screen.

All the constructive plans for the day being devoured in front of his majesty Mr.Loud-television-set, I now come face to face with the long queue of pending sleepless hours. Just to break the routine, I may as well sleep like a log and forget to set my alarm. And if you're reading this, you know, this is being typed yesterday, for there is no internet connection in this little(for the figuratives) home of my Grandma.
Sometimes I feel it is indeed nice to grow up. Then only do we realize how wonderful it is to return to childhood.