On the day of Ubunut 8.10 I’ve upgraded my work laptop (Dell D630) to Ubuntu 8.10. I’ve previously ran my home desktop on the release candidates and saw that all is well so I didn’t expect any specific issues with the upgrade.
After finishing the upgrade successfully I’ve encountered 2 problems.
The first was with the computer fan. It was workin on and off in full steam in 4 seconds cycles. Really annoying. A quick search in the Ubuntu forums led to this post saying I should upgrade to the latest BIOS version (A13 – at least at the time of writing this post).
Upgrading to the latest BIOS stopped the fan from cycling to full speed and full stop but it was still running a bit too much even when the computer was rather idle.
There was another post in the forums that suggested to go back to the older Nvidia drivers (version 173) instead of using the version which ships with Ubuntu 8.10 (177).
That managed to solve the fan issues for now as well as fix some strange repaint problems I was seeing when working with TwinView and extending my screen to another external monitor.
Thought it might help others who face these problems.