Ubuntu, Mac OS X and Windows updates

There were 65 updates for Ubuntu today. I'm doing them right now. That's a whole lotta updates. I'm doing them now. .. And monitoring my laptop's temperature to see when Ubuntu turns the fan on and off.

My Gateway Solo 1450 fan-management cron job that I adapted for Puppy Linux checks the CPU temperature every 5 minutes. If it's 50 degrees C or above, the fan turns on. Five minutes later, if CPU temperature is 40 C or less, the fan turns off.

Ubuntu, however (and perhaps Debian, too -- I will check) regularly lets the CPU (Celeron M 1.3 GHZ) run at 65 degrees C. The temp does drop on its own somewhat.

I wonder if there's a resource out there with optimal CPU temps for the various chips out there. If I could modify my Puppy cron job to turn the fan on at 60 or 65 C and turn it off at 50 C, that would make for less fan action (although when it goes on, it stays on for the full 5 minutes, minimum, due to the nature of the cron job; I don't think you can run a cron job any more closely spaced together than 5 minutes).

Back to Ubuntu: This many updates is to be expected in the early days of an OS upgrade. In other news, Apple issued a ton of updates, Microsoft only two on what is known in geekdom as "Patch Tuesday."

And here are even more Mac updates.

Thanks to the great Ars Technica for all this info (except for the Ubuntu updates, which I know about because I'm doing them).