Skip to main content

SolydXK linux laptop overheating

For the last couple of days, my home computer with SolydXK was overheating. The situation was so bad that, by the time I can gain control of the machine, it gets so overheated that it shuts down automatically as the critical temperatures have reached. I initially suspected acpi_call (just a hunch, because I have set up the OS on this machine quite recently and haven't tweaked the system much yet, except turning off the discrete graphics card using acpi_call). But removing the corresponding kernel module didn't do the trick. I booted into recovery mode, edited the /etc/rc.local to prevent loading the acpi_call kernel module and turning off the discrete graphics card. Although this sounds counter intuitive, because usually turning on the discrete graphics card causes the overheating, I saw some errors related to acpi_call during boot time too, which is why I targeted that first. But a reboot after exiting the recovery mode, now without acpi_call loaded, didn't prevent the laptop from overheating. So, I tried to chase my second suspect. Before the system would go down again reaching the critical temperature, I quickly ran apt upgrade, suspecting that some unstable package might be messing up the system. While running the upgrade, I also checked "top" as a sanity check (looking for a third suspect). The apt upgrade appeared to have upgraded some causual packages such as mendeley etc. It is the top result in which I found the culprit: a process called freshclam, running at 100%. I slaughtered it immediately (sudo killall freshclam). Result immediately showed up; the temperature slowly started to reduce. The next cpu hungry process in the race was dropbox. I killed it too. The computer became sane again (well, I could have safely spared dropbox, but I didn't want to take any chance at all :-P). I googled to find out what freshclam process was. The freshclam process was part of the clamav antivirus software!. It must have bundled in the default SolydXK distro. As I never previously used any antivirus software on any of my linux systems, I didn't see an immediate need for it now. So, I removed the clamav software for now (sudo apt purge clamav clamav-freshclam; there was a third package too, whose name probably was clamav-common). After this, everything was good. So, I re-enabled the acpi_call and turning off the discrete graphics card, by uncommenting those lines in /etc/rc.local. Everything has been running smooth ever since.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Setting up R packages for CBM of genome-scale metabolic models on Ubuntu 13.10

Long ago, I posted here the steps involved in setting up R packages for performing constraint based modelling (CBM) of genome scale metabolic models. It was Ubuntu 10.04 LTS back then. Now, I am trying to reproduce the same set-up on Ubuntu 13.10. As a quick summary, we need the following R packages: "sybil", "sybilSBML", and "glpkAPI". The "sybilSBML" R package requires the Bioconductor package "rsbml" which requires "libsbml" library, which in turn depends on "swig". The "glpkAPI" is an R wrapper for glpk library which is the optimization engine. I have been able to install all these packages by executing the following steps. 1. Install swig from ubuntu repositories. sudo apt-get install swig 2. Install python-dev from ubuntu repositories. sudo apt-get install python-dev 3. Install openjdk from ubuntu repositories. sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jdk 4. Install libxml2 and libxml2-d...
1 comment
Read more

ZyXEL VMG3326 D20A ADSL modem Linux wireless network problem

I bought 10Mbps ADSL network connection from Saunalahti . It works all perfect except for this little glitch I had with it: from my Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) or Ubuntu machine, I could not get the wireless network. While a windows machine and two android phones can access the wifi signals from the modem, the Linux machines can't even see the SSID of my network. In the beginning when I had just setup the modem I could access the wireless network from my LMDE machine. I started noticing the problem with the network, when I turned off my ADSL modem one day and in the evening turned it on. While all other machines got the connection as soon as the modem was up, my Linux machine could not detect the signal. After a little bit of messing around, I concluded that, for Linux to receive the wireless signal without a problem and to get the connection after the modem restarts, I need to follow the following protocol. I need to turn the wifi off on the modem by pressing a blue butto...
1 comment
Read more

Set up for analysing genome-scale metabolic models on ubuntu

I wanted to start analysing genome-scale metabolic models. I am interested in metabolic modelling to study human diseases. At least as of now, my idea is to use R for the analysis. This post describes all the technical set-up that I am doing on my ubuntu 10.04 LTS machine in order to eventually start working with these models. As I am interested in human metabolic network, my model of interest is the reconstructed human metabolic model, recon 2. I googled to see where I can download it from. It has a web site http://humanmetabolism.org/. But the model is available for download from the supplementary material of this paper . There was a zip file that contained many files which I interpret as the generic human model and cell specific models for a variety of cell types. I first wanted to see the contents of these files with my eyes. I know that I could open these files with any text editor, but I also knew that there is something called SBML editor which is specifically designed fo...
Post a Comment
Read more