Easy fan control for Thinkpad x230?

[tarverator]

I have a Thinkpad x230 i5-3360M running Linux Mint Mate 18.1 (Serena) 64-bit

For some reason, my fan has gotten noisier recently. I got it physically cleaned, but it still ramps up and whines in a very distracting way under even moderate loads, and even with the CPU governor set to powersave. So I started messing around with thinkfan and all the configuration files, but none of the tutorials I found were for the x230 specifically, and I don't want to spend hours on this.

Is there a simple, user-friendly (perhaps GUI) little utility, or something that I can set in very few steps, that can get the fan to JUST BE QUIET? I don't care - within reason - how much I have to throttle back the CPU, or if some background task takes 0.3 seconds longer. How do I tell my machine that it is not allowed to work so hard that it starts to break a sweat and need the fan?

Thanks!

[tarverator]

Hearing crickets for an easy fix, I rolled up my sleeves and got thinkfan working. Didn't take as long as I had feared... I'm just rusty on tinkering under the hood here.

Here's the relevant part of /etc/thinkfan.conf for anyone else looking to tweak this:

Code: Select all

# values from http://x220.mcdonnelltech.com/ubuntu/
tp_fan /proc/acpi/ibm/fan
hwmon /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp
(0, 0,  60) 
(1, 53, 65) 
(2, 55, 66) 
(3, 57, 68) 
(4, 61, 70) 
(5, 64, 71) 
(7, 68, 32767)

[Moem]

Thinkfan would be really great if it had a GUI. I seem to recall it did have one at an earlier time but that part was discontinued.