Dear lazyweb, how can I make this system as quite on Fedora as it is on Windows? It’s absolutely silent when Win7 is running, but when Fedora is running the fans are quite noisy. Most of the time the system has a load average of 0.00 so it isn’t CPU spiking causing the fans to go full-bore. For temperatures I have Core0 at about 51C and Core1 at 44C and the other two cores at 48C, but the fans are running at 1583 and 1160 rpm. I can’t get the sensors to pick up temps or fan speeds on Win7 for some reason so don’t have a basis for comparison (tried a few of those “gadgets” and none show me temperatures).

There has to be a way to lower the fan speed on Fedora but I can’t find it. I tried fancontrol from lm_sensors but it complains about not being able to manually set the fans and there’s nothing I can see in the BIOS that’s even remotely relevant.

Am I doomed to a noisy Fedora box? Or is there a way I can make this thing quieter short of buying new fans? (The latter is an option I suppose, but if Win7 can run perfectly silent, then I’m of the frame of mind that Fedora should too). Running an up to date F13 (wheeee!!). Thanks for any suggestions.

Currently Fedora is third at 8% with Ubuntu leading at 35%, and Debian in second at 10%.

Show these people some Fedora pride!

Congrats Fedora developers, users, testers, QA guys, and the many many many other people I’m forgetting. I don’t mind saying that I used to hate Fedora, but I think I was biased with years of Mandriva and just plain old not being used to it. Now that I’ve used Fedora 10, 11, and now 12, I can honestly say that I’m a great big Fedora fan now (and, seriously, if you’re still reading my gushing and haven’t started downloading, get cracking because it’s worth it!)

So I think this might be a good move. rsec is essentially a complete tool, but if we can swap in msec’s plugin functionality for the reports and make it so that is can be a standalone component separate from msec (be it that msec drops the reporting capabilities and adopts a refreshed rsec as a dependency, or whether msec permits building just the reporting capabilities separate from the msec stuff), then I’m definitely game. What might be interesting, however, is to see how msec and rsec can be merged with sectool in some way. To be honest, I’d never heard of sectool until Eugeni mentioned it… it’s a Fedora project so it might have a lot of Red Hat/Fedora-specific stuff in there, but if it is or could be more generalized to do what msec does as well as what rsec does, then maybe there’s a place for one tool to take the place of three tools and have a broader usage base and become a better tool.

The opportunity here to build a better tool out of two, or maybe even three, tools is quite interesting and one of the things I love about open source. Merging msec and rsec should be quite easy I think. Merging with sectool might be more difficult, but I see a lot of crossover in what msec and sectool both do already — there really is no reason to have a Mandriva-specific tool and a Fedora-specific tool that do the same thing. I suspect sectool might be good at creating decent reports which may even obsolete the need for rsec. Taking a closer look at sectool will help me determine if that is the case (and then it remains to be seen if there is a sectool build for EPEL or if it can be done since I’m currently using rsec on some Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and CentOS 5 systems).

Either way, I smell some possibilities here.