I'm having problems controlling the fan of my Lenovo Thinkpad L430. The fan doesn't start. Without any fan control installed the fan just doesn't run. If I run stress, it does run a little, but it's nowhere near the speed it should be. After a while, the laptop just overheats and stops. I Tried to install tp-fancontrol, and enabled thinkpad_acpi fancontrol=1, but to no avail. If I try to set the fan speed manually, it doesn't start up.

In windows, there's a program called TPFanControl. It turns out that this laptop uses a different scheme to control the fan than other thinkpads. The level runs from 0 to 255, and max = 0 and min=255. Now I'm looking for a fan control program that works for linux. Does anyone know if it actually exists? Anyone with any experience on fan control on a L430?

Update:

sudo pwmconfig gives the following output:

# pwmconfig revision 5857 (2010-08-22)
This program will search your sensors for pulse width modulation (pwm)
controls, and test each one to see if it controls a fan on
your motherboard. Note that many motherboards do not have pwm
circuitry installed, even if your sensor chip supports pwm.

We will attempt to briefly stop each fan using the pwm controls.
The program will attempt to restore each fan to full speed
after testing. However, it is ** very important ** that you
physically verify that the fans have been to full speed
after the program has completed.

Found the following devices:
   hwmon0 is acpitz
   hwmon1/device is coretemp    
   hwmon2/device is thinkpad

Found the following PWM controls:
   hwmon2/device/pwm1
hwmon2/device/pwm1 is currently setup for automatic speed control.
In general, automatic mode is preferred over manual mode, as
it is more efficient and it reacts faster. Are you sure that
you want to setup this output for manual control? (n) y

Giving the fans some time to reach full speed...
Found the following fan sensors:
   hwmon2/device/fan1_input     current speed: 0 ... skipping!

There are no working fan sensors, all readings are 0.
Make sure you have a 3-wire fan connected.
You may also need to increase the fan divisors.
See doc/fan-divisors for more information.

regards,

Dirk