Debian Lenny giveth, then taketh away

Here's what happened. The $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450) allows its noisy CPU fan to be managed by a few, proud Linux kernels. The rest do nothing. Most situations can be fixed by a cron job (the details of which I will -- finally, eventually -- publish in full). Ubuntu 6.06 LTS is one of those on which I can't even get the cron job to run, but most (including Puppy Linux, on which I write this now) can be tamed.

Debian Etch managed the fan right from the first boot. And I thought the new kernel in Debian Lenny did so too. That would make it the first "newish" kernel to do so. I thought the kernel developers had pretty much forsaken this Gateway. Thus I was surprised on first boot of the new Lenny kernel that the fan did fall silent.

It didn't last long. A few days later, the fan noise returned, the CPU fan blew constantly, and it could only be managed with the cron job, or by booting the old Etch kernel. I'm at odds as to how to handle it, but the cron job works pretty well in Puppy, and I'm about 80 percent sure I'll have similar success with Lenny. Or, as I said, I can use the 2.6.18 kernel in Etch for the foreseeable future, since it does stick around when an Etch install is upgraded to Lenny. I did the same thing with Ubuntu when going from 7.04 to 7.10, only since then I've had such bad luck with 7.10 that I've rolled back to 7.04. And now the boot sequence with Ubuntu 7.04 is stalling halfway through on something having to do with the CD drive. I had to turn off the "quiet" boot parameter in GRUB to even figure this out ...

And the touchy touchpad problem in Debian is better in Lenny than in Etch, but not 100 percent tamed. Tapping on the GNOME menus at the top of the screen no longer causes them to flash, but tapping on menus within applications still produces the same momentary flashes as in Etch. I figure that this whole problem can be solved in xorg.conf, or I can just stop tapping to click (Puppy doesn't seem to support that feature, and I'm more than fine with it).

Yep, just to keep my sanity over the weekend, I booted into Puppy Linux 3.00 and stayed there ...

That's all. Back to your regularly scheduled weekend (and mine).