Getting i8k to work

[eddieg538]

Ok, my computer just upgraded to 14.04 from 12.04 and now i8k plugin for gkrellm will not run, it just crashes gkrellm. Has anyone fixed this on their Dell? If so how? If not, any suggestions? Thank you.

[eddieg538]

No one?? Not even a guess?

[millusions]

try conky
gkrellm is so old school, conky is much nicer

apt-get install conky; conky &; cd; touch .conkyrc; kate .conkyrc to modify

screenshot (not mine)

[eddieg538]

How does conky work? Will it let me control my laptop fans? Does it work with kde or does it take over your desktop? Thank you for answering my question.

[eddieg538]

Ok, I installed it but how do I find it? There is no icon for it?

[millusions]

you'll have to do some reading, i cant give you all the answers,

since you've installed it just run conky in terminal - you can close the terminal once you do that..

have a read of this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conky_%28software%29

and maybe this https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/conky

conky manager is a pretty good tool to get you started, http://www.teejeetech.in/p/conky-manager.html

from there you'll probably want to write your own conky..

my laptop one looks like this:

[eddieg538]

I really appreciate your help but I don't want to have to learn to write code to use a program. gkrellm was very nice and now the i8k plugin won't work. Obviously something in the kernel is different because 3.2 seems to work fine with the plugin that 3.13 won't. Maybe something can be installed in the newer kernel that is needed for the plugin or the plugin needs to be updated. I know other Dell users are experiencing the same problems.

[eddieg538]

I couldn't use i8k plugin for gkrellm anymore. I suppose something in the kernel has changed. So I tried this and it works great.

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/control...-debian-linux/


I changed the temps in the i8kmon file to what I wanted and now my fan keeps my computer cool like the gkrellm plugin did.

[Laysan_A]

Okay, I know this is from way back last summer, and I know it's marked solved, but I just spent at least a full 24 hours (prob. longer) on this, and I finally got it to work. So, at least for posterity's sake (it is marked solved, after all - and I bet Eddie's still interested), I thought I'd leave some kind of record of what worked for me.

Alright. I just bought this old (2007) Inspiron 1501 on Ebay as a spare computer (no withdrawals in this house!) and as a second laptop, since my wife has posession of our only other one. It has a Turion processor (1.8, dual core), so it is 64bit. I just installed Kubuntu 14.04 on it.

While the struggle to get Gkrellm installed with Gkrellm-i8k (and it was a struggle) was finally successful, I have to admit that I'm not entirely sure why - which means I'm still not entirely sure why it WAS such a struggle in the first place. I know at least part of the struggle was because the Gkrellm-i8k I had was a 32bit .deb file, which meant that everything else Gkrellm needed to be 32bit too (did you know that if you build something on a 64bit machine, it comes out 64bit - even if the tarball's old and seems like it SHOULD be 32bit? I didn't.) Without embarrassing myself too much, lets just say I didn't catch on right away, and Gkrellm was installed and uninstalled a great many times; I'm not mentioning the plug-ins.

On top of this (at least I think it's on top of, perhaps they were related) for the longest time I could not get i8k.ko to load. I got it to load once in about a million different tries, but it went away after I rebooted. I got "no such file or directory" messages, error messages about improper lines in the modprobe.d i8k.conf file, and "unable to insert i8k". It was SO frustrating! It's possible the failure had to do with whichever bits of Gkrellm I managed to install, but I think it also may've been the absence of configuration files supporting its presence in the kernel. But whichever, this is essentially what I did.

I removed all the Gkrellm stuff: gkrellm, i8kutils, gkrellmwireless, gkrelltop, and gkrellm-i8k. I installed my 32bit .deb of gkrellm-i8k with Qapt Package Installer. Then I followed the instructions in this post : http://keenformatics.blogspot.com.tr...issues-in.html that showed how to set the system calls for the i8k module and what configuration files were needed to make everything work. I didn't install i8kutils again until after I'd done that, and loaded the module.

Once I had the various files done, I tried to load the i8k module again. I typed "sudo modprobe i8k force=1" and hit enter. It worked. I entered lsmod, and there it was, i8k, at the top of the list of running modules. It had a little aura around it, sparkling and gleaming with magical possibilities - well, it seemed like it did, at least. Then I set about reinstalling i8kutils:i386, Gkrellm:i386, and 32bit versions of the wireless and top plugins.

One thing about the deb of gkrellm I got: I installed lm-sensors, along with the development libs, libsensors (because I started out compiling my own gkrellm from source). It seems, if you install gkrellm from the Ubuntu repositories, you get a gkrellm without libsensor support built-in (see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...lm/+bug/688944 ). I googled and found my deb in the Debian repository (https://packages.debian.org/wheezy/i...rellm/download ). Unfortunately, even though Gkrellm is now being developed again, I couldn't use the latest version because apt told me in no uncertain terms that I could not possibly fulfill one of the dependencies in my i386 version, so I had to go back and get the old 2.3.5-3 version. In any case, the Debian Gkrellms have libsensor support built-in, if you have it installed.

So, that's pretty much that.

When I first installed i8kutils it was erroring-out, and I couldn't get (or didn't know how to) any real information about why, but the installation wasn't quite complete. I suspect now it was because it needed the i8k module to load. Whether or not the module needed all the gkrellm stuff out of the way, or needed its various calls and configuration file, doing both of those allowed the module to load and then i8kutils installed normally, as did gkrellm-i8k before it.

Oh, you should probably know, I installed a bunch of 32bit libraries. With all this talk about multiarch I don't know if it was necessary (I haven't seen a single really clear description of what multiarch is and how it works), but if you're in the same boat I am, and your installations aren't finishing, you may need some extra libraries.

Anyway, my little fans are there (I absolutely LOVE those little fans - they're so comforting when they're spinning. I don't have to worry about my laptop melting down), and all is well with the world.

Merry Christmas!

[Laysan_A]

Okay...you should all be aware, I'm an idiot.

When I posted my previous entry I had been up for a looong time and I was just so PLEASED that I finally got everything installed without any errors that I didn't really take any time to verify that it actually worked! No, I posted in this thread, pleased that I could share my hard-earned fruits, shut down and went to bed. I made the unfortunate discovery the next day when I booted-up.

Unrelated to my installation of the 'Krellms (pretty sure), my new install of 14.04 started acting strangely that next day, finally becoming unusable and requiring a reinstall. So, since my new newly fresh Kubuntu installation required an equally fresh 'Krellm installation, I decided to see if I could locate a source package of Gkrellm-i8k so I could do the whole thing in 64bit this time. I did, and I did. Unfortunately it didn't seem to matter.

The i8k module seems unable to read my bios, and it appears not to be able to read the k8 temps. The result is that even though everything is in place and works, there's no data. The little fan that I like so much will spin if I click on it - once for low, twice for high, but it's not connected to anything. It's uselessness mocks me.

While it seems it is not uncommon to get the following response for the following quiery, it has not kept at least some of those who reported from achieving a working fan control with the i8kmon daemon and it's config file.

me@Dell1501:~$ dmesg | grep i8k
[ 14.445671] i8k: unable to get SMM Dell signature
[ 14.445686] i8k: unable to get SMM BIOS version

I'm hoping, like eddie, that I qualify, but neither i8kfan nor lm-sensors' fan utility seem able to locate my fan control (though the fan has turned on occasionally in response to my fiddling - perhaps just to mess with me). The fan in this computer is really really quiet (maybe it only spins on low?), and it's too soon to know if the daemon route is going to work for me. If nothing else, at least my k8 temps (but no voltages) show-up in GKrellm's sensors panel.

Given my complete and utter failure to achieve anything at all beyond that of the OP - not to mention taking up all this space to do it in, I hereby extend my heartiest, most abject apologies for taking up your valuable time and for re-opening a completed thread that would have been perfectly happy left alone, and debase myself completely before you.
(sorry)