Fan going crazy

[mico]

whenever I leave my machine unattended for a few minutes the CPU fan start cycling faster than usual (it makes noise), this is before the screen saver goes on.
I have an intel 64 bit dual core chip and my graphic card is installed and well.
I am not running anything else and get a really low CPU usage under the system monitor
what could cause this? , why does it start cycling fast anyways?

[antiquexray]

whenever I leave my machine unattended for a few minutes the CPU fan start cycling faster than usual (it makes noise), this is before the screen saver goes on.
I have an intel 64 bit dual core chip and my graphic card is installed and well.
I am not running anything else and get a really low CPU usage under the system monitor
what could cause this? , why does it start cycling fast anyways?

I remember something about this, but not much, it might be a Ubuntu thing. Why don't you post a message to jml, he's the one that told me about it.

[mico]

doesen't seem to answer me, if anyone else heard about this please reply
thank you

[scorp123]

what could cause this? , why does it start cycling fast anyways?

Maybe a broken BIOS ... "broken" in the sense that whoever produced it (Phoenix, Intel, Award, VIA, etc.) did not stick to certain standards and Linux has troubles getting the right values out of it. So it could happen that Linux sees false heat values and assumes that the temperature is too high and that it needs to cool down the system ...

What brand is your PC precisely? And your motherboard? Try Googling around, e.g. "Your-PC-Brand +Linux +ACPI" or something like that.

[mico]

It's an abit motherboard, It's not a laptop so there isn't a "brand maker" for it
I'll get the model number of the motherboard

[mico]

It's an abit NI8-SLI
one thing I don't understand is this, if the system has a problem detecting the real temp of the CPU why does the fan only start revving up after an idle minute?!

[scorp123]

It's an abit NI8-SLI
one thing I don't understand is this, if the system has a problem detecting the real temp of the CPU why does the fan only start revving up after an idle minute?!

Do you have Beagle installed??? Could be that whenever your computer is idle Beagle's search functions fire up and search all your disks for stuff. This of course will cause a big CPU load and hence necessitate more cooling .... And that's why you think that your PC is "idle" when in fact Beagle causes it to work like a donkey ...

I personally never liked Beagle and I always uninstall it ...

[mico]

nautilus,nautilus CD burner and yelp all seem to be dependent upon
libbeagle0, I shouldn't remove this, right?

[scorp123]

nautilus,nautilus CD burner and yelp all seem to be dependent upon
libbeagle0, I shouldn't remove this, right?

Search for "beagle-index" (e.g. in synaptic). Leave the libraries "as is", as you guessed correctly this would uninstall way too much. Maybe there is a way to disable the search service?

[mico]

The other beagle packages are away, my machine is much much much more serene now, you saved me!
is there any other software that does stuff I don't need on idle?

[scorp123]

is there any other software that does stuff I don't need on idle?

Well, best thing would be to keep watching. Look around if there is some sort of system load monitor that you could use and work with, e.g. one for GNOME if that is your desktop. Then keep an eye on the graphs. If the system load goes up all of a sudden you know that there is something around. Another thing that may cause the system load to go up are those fancy 3D screensavers, the OpenGL ones. I agree, they really look cool and all that, but I personally am more happy when I set my screensaver to something very simple, e.g. the plain analogue clock or just "blank screen". Those 3D screensavers can also put a high load on your system if you leave them on for too long.

[mico]

doesen't seem to go past 10%, probably ok... cheers