@Krellin

The fan appears to be moving.

The CPU is deeply embarrassed to be running linux?

I guess a background process is keeping the CPU revved up. Surely it's a known issue?

http://askubuntu.com/questions/44114/high-idle-cpu-temperature-under-ubuntu-but-not-windows

What processes are running?

@ye

Looking at the system monitor, nothing is showing up as using the CPU...

Weird. Maybe it is a kernel issue as suggested in the discussion from the link fiedler posted. Have you tried updating the kernel or falling back to an older version?

You could also try rebuilding the kernel, but that would be a bit more involved.

Honestly, I've tried to stay away from messing with the kernel. I really don't understand it nor have the interest in learning.

Try a different distro? Linux Mint seems pretty interesting. I just DLed it a few days ago and am planning to try that out when I get some time. Besides, I'm really not a big fan of the new Unity interface.

Oh, and I have already tried a number of things from fied's link. I tried a number of frequency scaling things. ATM, it seems like if I keep all cores/threads at 1.2GHz, there isn't a big heating issue, but, I mean, I didn't pay for a 2GHz CPU to have it locked at 1.2GHz and Ubuntu seems to be unable to ondemand scaling, so...

Oh, I hate Unity. I don't understand it at all. But, it's trivial to go back to Gnome, which I really like.

The thing is, I actually like Ubuntu overall and I use it in the Lab everyday, so I'm pretty familiar with it. I'm not trying to escape from Windows by any distro necessary, I just actually like using Ubuntu.

But, let me know what you think of Mint.

I've kinda locked myself to Ubuntu 10.10 just to stay away from Unity.

Everything I am running luckily is available in 10.10 so it works for me.

We have 11.04 and 11.10 in our lab on a bunch of MacMini's and it's horrible to work on any of those things. Each one has some different finicky problem that we can't track down and consistently reproduce or fix.

Sorry I don't have many (any?) options for you other than try 10.10 if you can get away with it.

Mint is basically a lighter-weight Ubuntu. I haven't tried the most recent version, but I think they still use gnome.

Mint is definitely the distro to go to if Ubuntu is giving you problems but you want to keep the familiarity.

Unity is basically their attempt to chase the tablet trend by including an interface designed for tablets as the default and only pre-installed option on a desktop distribution. While I'm all for cross-platform design, the way in which they've made this rash decision and the manner in which this interface diminishes the out-of-box customizability and usability of the distro speaks volumes to the philosophical path this distribution seems to headed down. It's still a great OS and its easy enough to go back gnome, kde, xfce, or anything else, but I feel its time to explore a bit for other nice alternatives.

I may give 10.10 a try, but it's getting annoying just randomly installing OSes hoping one won't overheat.

Perhaps silly, but are you sure the CPU is actually as hot as it claims to be? Perhaps there is just some sort of software glitch that is misreading the sensor on your laptop.

lol

Yes. It hurts my hand to touch the CPU-side of the case. Otherwise, I never would have even noticed.

I'm going to boot up right now and see if I can give any more info.

Just checking :D

Check out this thread abge: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1876117

So, I'm on Ubuntu atm.

Locking the 4 threads to 1.2GHz gives me a reasonable (if not still much higher than Windows) temp of 58degC.

@Poozer

Most of that link seems to be talking about fan noise, which isn't my problem.

I am going to try that link to Jupiter, though.

Oh, well this is interesting. My computer is listed as "certified" on the Canonical site.

Certified to what? Set my lap on fire?

You got exhaust fan scorch marks on your thighs now abge?

lol

No, I just went back to Windows. I like Ubuntu but

1) I do all my work on my laptop, so I can't fuck around with it too much and
2) It's a tablet and I write notes on it and getting the touchscreen to work was a whole other ordeal.

And that's how microsoft zombies breed, through necessity. Trust me I'm right there with you. My ubuntu desktop is beginning to gather dust as I near crunch time on my thesis and the windows laptop is quickly becoming my best friend.

After all, the variety and quality of LaTeX distributions for windows isn't too shabby, and that (and Matlab) are all I really need right now.

"And that's how microsoft zombies breed"

- how? By offering an operating system that actually works? Those devils.