Acer Aspire One temperature, WAS: Acer Aspire One questions

[Giles Orr]

2009/11/5 Madison Kelly <linux-5ZoueyuiTZhBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org>:
> Giles Orr wrote:
>> I bought an Acer Aspire One recently and installed Debian testing on
>> it.  I have several questions:
[SNIP]
>> - the command "acpi -t" returns no information at all, where would I
>> start on getting that working?
>
> Not sure, but I know on my Debian server I get nothing from ACPI, too. I've
> not looked into it, but would be curious to hear what you find out.

I managed to get the temperature from the machine, although by a
method which will offer no help to anyone who doesn't own an AAO.
Dave Collier-Brown pointed me to a utility for controlling the AAO's
fan.  It calls a Perl script
(http://code.google.com/p/aceracpi/wiki/EmbeddedController) which
dumps the registers of the embedded controller, and one of those
registers contains the temperature.  It hasn't been abstracted more
than this because apparently what register contains what info is
subject to change with every BIOS version.  Happily I was able to
write a small Bash script to call the Perl script, grab the correct
register, and convert the hex value to a decimal Celsius temperature.
(If I knew perl better I would just have modded the original script,
but my perl is pretty weak.)

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
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