i8k on Inspiron 5150 (to attempt to address overheating)

[Michael Abbott <mabster@internode.on.net>]

Hi,

I'm currently looking at a whole bunch of options to prevent my laptop
from overheating (this appears to be a known issue with the Dell
Inspiron 5150).  I've just read a whole bunch of stuff on using i8k to
let the CPU fan come in at an earlier temperature and thought it would
be worth a go.  Note that I'm using Ubuntu, but the setup / situation
should be the same (and this list is full of laptop wizards ;).

My installation doesn't have i8k by default so I tried to modprobe it.
modprobe said that the device cannot be found.  A modprobe with force=1
worked, but running i8kctl then just returns some rather bogus results
(I think):

mabster@mab:~$ i8kctl
1.0 (null) 222P91S 59 -1 2 -1 113160 0 2

Now according to some documentation I found floating on the net, the
Inspiron 5150 is meant to be supported by i8k but only with particular
revisions of the BIOS.  Is it possible to find out which revisions and
what revision I'm currently running?  Google just hasn't been helping me
with this one tonight :(.

Also, any general overheating help would be most appreciated.  I've
tried a couple things now:  Disable apmd.  Run on a non-SMP kernel
instead.  All to no avail.  There are some hardware related solutions
that I might avoid (until I get this working at least) since I didn't
have the same overheating issues under WinXP (which hopefully means
there is a software fix ;).

Thanks,
- Mab