DesktopBSD's brief, shining moment

I've been shuttling CDs in and out of my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop, just seeing what works and how well.

I've also been fiddling around with the BIOS settings, trying to get the CPU fan under control in both Linux and the various BSDs. A select few Linux kernels do this automatically ... most don't. I can control the fan with a cron job, but I've never, ever been able to do this with any version of BSD.

Until today. For some reason, I ran DesktopBSD 1.6 as a live CD, and the fan fell silent, turning on at various intervals, then off.

Like it's supposed to do.

I rebooted.

It worked again.

A couple of boots later, it stopped working. I changed nothing between boots. It could've had something to do with going from Debian Lenny to DesktopBSD ...

So while ACPI fan control is possible with FreeBSD -- upon which DesktopBSD is based -- I've got nothing in the bag. And it may never work again.

I tried PC-BSD 1.4 and FreeBSD 6.3 (just booting, not installing) ... and the fan roared as always. I thought I could control it from a console, but that didn't work.

But for two brief, shining moments, I had a FreeBSD-based system running with CPU fan management working perfectly.

If only it would happen again.