Over the last few days, I have noticed unusual fan behavior on my Linux Mint XFCE notebook during video playback. The fan now turns on for 1-2 seconds and then turns off again. This repeats itself dozens of times until it eventually rotate continuously for a while (as before over 10 years) and then turn off again. It's like a car that tries to start but won't start, only after many attempts.
This behavior occurred after a recent kernel and firmware update.
Is it possible that something has been misconfigured?
Today, I will test what happens when I boot with an older kernel.
Could I also downgrade the firmware to a previous version?
I use the nouveau drivers for my nvidia card, but I'm not sure which graphics card is active during video playing in brave browser, and if this is important.
Everything else works well, video watching is no problem except the disturbing noise. Since I use the notebook as a TV, I would like to fix the fan problem.
That's a good idea. Until now, I've only felt the bottom of the laptop with my hands to check for heat, but I haven't used psensors or anything like that.
Booting into an earlier kernel didn´t solve the problem, so I´d like to downgrade the firmware for testing if it helps.
When I run apt-cache policy linux-firmware it shows the available packages. I tested it on Zorin 18 live session and there it worked in principle (without updating initramfs to be applied).
The current linux-firmware package is
20240318.git3b128b60-0ubuntu2.22
and I want to go back to
20240318.git3b128b60-0ubuntu2.21
Is this procedure correct to do so on my real system? I have never done this. Is it not neccessary to remove the installed firmware-package first?
I would then mark-hold this package for a while until there will be the next firmware update and reboot.
With the 2.22 package, the fan only started up very rarely and after dozens of attempts. The terminal command 'sensors' showed approx. 64°C for CPU when the fan started up.
Yesterday there was a new linux-firmware update, but it didn't really improve the fan behavior. Now it ran smoothly again, but almost continuously during video playback.
Unfortunately, no one could tell me how to downgrade the firmware, so yesterday I just tried it as described above and it worked - but it wasn't like it was recently. That's why I updated the firmware back to the current package.
Until now, I had always used kernel 6.8. Today I installed kernel 6.14 and will see how it goes.
At the moment It seems to be better with kernel 6.14, but I'd like to check the cpu temperatures and for easier access to display them in the taskbar.
I installed xfce4-sensors-plugin and added it to the taskbar, but it doesn´t show the temperature directly in the panel.
Is it possible to display the temperature instead of the word "Sensoren" (=sensors) in the taskbar?
Does Right Click > Properties
Then in View tab - have "Show Labels" selected?
If so, disable "Show Label" so that the temperatures are displayed, not "Sensors."
Then, select what temps you want displayed.
Those will be shown on the panel, instead of the "Sensors" plugin label.
Thank you very much for your help, Aravisian!
I hadn't tried right-clicking yet and hadn't seen this window with further settings. Now everything works perfectly!
I had to enable the sensors in the tab sensors (and I also disabled the title, but that is not neccessary)
Next step is to change the color.
Edit: I set the color to #000000, and now the font is black and I can better read it.
A bit off topic, but as other forum users complain, when there are often threads with LinuxMint questions, I put it here.
You see in my taskbar that Brave browser opens new tabs separately, and the Brave icon is not the Brave icon from the theme I use. It should be a yellow-brown lion (the same icon as the third icon on the left side).
How can I change that?
This is a persistent issue that bugs me as well. It stems from Chromium Based browsers carrying their own UI.
The app menu and system menu will show the icon from your theme, but the call on the tasklist buttons on the panel will only get a response that carries the Browsers in-built U.I. theme.
And this bothers me enough that I use devilspie2 to replace the errant icons.
You can use wmctrl to do it, as well. But the reality is, you realistically must script it, since every restart or log in can change the Window I.D.
That sounds really complicated to change that permanently!
Is the browser unable to open at the place of the original icon?
Do you also know why in the tray icons the icon of the system updater app is small although there are all icons set to automatically adapt size to panel height?
Some of the newer applets, like StatusNotifer do not respect the panel scaling, but instead have the size set by the application.
System Updater is a Gnome application and it assumes Gnome Shell in use and so only supplies one small icon.
On the surface, it looks like an XFCE bug. It actually is not. It is due to Gnome.
But XFCE will not fix it, because that transfers ownership to them, and it also can create other bugs.
Slightly, it sounds more complex than it is and it is well within your ability to do it.
I find it rewarding in that those steps lead to steps that allow further control: For example, I tied Steam into it so it respected not just the icon, but the entire System Theme including window borders, which Steam UI really does not want us doing (And I don't like being told what I cannot do.)
Until just now, when I opened Brave Browser in my Zorin 17 lite VM, only the icons pinned to the taskbar were visible and no new icon for the Brave Browser tab appeared when I opened Brave.
Unfortunately, I clicked on a different layout in Zorin Appearance because I wanted to simulate the LM look and my taskbar settings were reset. Now I can't get it back to how it was. Previously, no indicators for running apps were displayed, but now they are.
In any case, the Brave browser icon is displayed correctly in Zorin 17 lite, except in the workspace overview.
Not so on LM XFCE based on ubuntu 24. Maybe something has been changed or it is a problem of the icon theme.
I´d like to have it like in my gnome session. The browser is opened at the icon, there are not two icons for the browser. The screen capture don't show the indicator, but there is a line under the icon of Brave browser so that I see it is opened.
Edit: I found the setting. If I don't want to display running apps as icons I have to remove the docklike taskbar. But then I don't see which apps are running because they are not marked.
I wonder if that is where some differences can be explained.
On mine, it is the default browser supplied icon in both Workspaces applet and in Tasklist buttons. Using my method above, however, both display the one from my icon theme.
In Zorin 17 lite I'm on 4.18.3
Edit:
When I enable the Window Button plugin to display opened apps with their names, the browser icon is wrong. So it seems to be caused by the Window Buttons plugin and should be solved by using the docklike taskbar plugin instead. I`ll test this later on my Mint computer.
I played a bit with the settings, and now I put all my pinned apps from the taskbar into the docklike taskbar plugin. Before they were not in the plugin. Now the behavior is similar as in gnome:
Pinned apps do not open with a new icon but from the same icon and get underlined (line for active window, dot for inactive window).
I have to find out how I can move the icons within the docklike taskbar plugin to change the sort order. Until now I have found no way.
Edit: Move the mouse over an icon, press ctrl+left mouse key and then you can move the icon
I just tested Zorin Lite 17.1 in distrosea to see how it behaves there. Everything was fine and looked exactly as I had laboriously tried to set up today. I must have messed something up in all my attempts with the xfce4-goodies and other xfce4-stuff when I was trying out different plugins.
However, one thing has become much clearer to me today:
Zorin uses the docklike plugin by default in layout 1 of Zorin Appearance, and the three apps on the taskbar are pinned to this dock.
I always added apps via the Zorin start menu > Add to panel.
However, these apps are not added to the dock and cannot be pinned to the dock afterwards.
To achieve this, you have to use a different method: Simply start the desired app, then right-click on the icon in the panel and select "Pin to dock".
All apps that have been pinned to the dock open directly at the corresponding icon in the panel.
All apps that have only been pinned to the panel open with a new, second icon.
In layout 2 of Zorin Appearance the Window Buttons plugin is used by default.
Now I understand why you can't switch easily between the layouts in Zorin lite (when you do this most settings you made in the panel are reset) as you can do in Zorin core.
In LM XFCE 22.1 the docklike-plugin doesn't exist and there is used the Window Buttons plugin as default. I'm not sure how it can be installed there. To me it seems as if a ppa is needed to install it or to build it from source.
The package is not found, nothing shown. I didn't find it in the repository.
With the docklike-plugin it is more complicated - I've never read about those differences in adding apps to panel.
