i8kctl(1)

NAME

i8kctl - Utility to define and retrieve information about the fans states and speeds on Dell laptops.

SYNOPSIS
i8kctl [<param> [<args>]]

DESCRIPTION

The i8kctl utility provides a command-line interface to retrieve one of the information listed below. It does that by means of querying the system through the i8k kernel module. When invoked without arguments it reports all the information at once in one line of text. These information are the same contained in the file /proc/i8k.

    1. i8k output format version
    2. Dell bios version
    3. service tag (later 'machine id')
    4. cpu temperature
    5. left fan status
    6. right fan status
    7. left fan speed
    8. right fan speed
    9. ac power status
    10. fn buttons status

The following parameters are used to select one of the items above: version, bios, id, temp, fan, speed, ac and fn.

Some examples of usage and output are below.

    $ i8kctl
    1.0 A17 B5W123K 52 2 1 8040 6420 1 2

    $ i8kctl temp
    52

    $ i8kctl fan
    2 1

The fan parameter accepts two optional arguments for the fans states. The state arguments can be:

    0 turn the fan off
    1 set low speed
    2 set high speed
    - don't change the state of this fan

And the following is an example of usage:

    $ i8kctl fan - 2

This sets the right fan to high speed and leaves the left unchanged. It should be noted that if the i8kmon(1) daemon is used to control the fans, setting the speed with i8kctl fan is pointless since the daemon override regularly the speed with its own value.

If i8kctl fan is invoked without the optional arguments, the states of the fans are returned, and the output may contains a -1 which indicates that the corresponding fan does not exist.

FILES

/proc/i8k

AUTHORS

2013-2014 Vitor Augusto <vitorafsr@gmail.com>
2001-2009 Massimo Dal Zotto <dz@debian.org>

COPYRIGHT

i8kctl is part of the i8kutils package. All files are distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). On Debian GNU/Linux systems, the complete text of the GNU General Public License can be found in `/usr/share/common-licenses/GPL'.

SEE ALSO

i8kmon(1)