I find that sometimes different distros have different default supported configs and grok to different degrees various features and hardware.

You might try booting various live cds and see what they grok. I loved knoppix to quickly tell how linux friendly a given machine is. Maybe ubuntu or fedora will give you a different view.

Live cds often have elaborate complete detection stages... boot and see what chips and config it detects.

You might try older versions of distros that have better support for older hardware. Maybe try the version of the live cd that was released one year after the introduction of the laptop.

David

David Thornton @northdot9 https://www.quadratic.net

On Nov 11, 2017 4:36 AM, "ac via talk" <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:

On Fri, 10 Nov 2017 20:37:43 -0500
Kevin Cozens via talk <talk@gtalug.org> wrote:
> On 2017-11-10 03:31 PM, Giles Orr via talk wrote:
> > I have a very old laptop I'm trying to rehabilitate and use with
> > Debian: it's got an AMD Turion chip and 1G of RAM.  Works fine.Â
> > But one annoying problem under Linux: the fan runs flat out all the
> > time.Â
> If the fan connection to the MB is only two pins it may not have the
> ability to operate at anything other than full speed. Check the MB

keyword, 'may' on my notebook the main fan has two pins but it has
variable speed... so i guess ymmv

so +1 for checking the manual or contact manufacturer website/support

> manual. As this is a laptop you may find it hard to locate
> information about fan control.
> You could add a circuit to do variable speed control of the fan but
> it may be difficult, if not impossible, to fit it in to the laptop case.
>
again depending on notebook/laptop model... many of the older models
(before space became such a fixating factor) actually has lots of crawl
space, just yesterday i added some custom components to one of
my old HP's and recall thinking how cool it is that it can all fit
inside the case :)