Laptop gets very hot even in idle

Question

I have the problem that my laptop, a Compaq 615, gets very hot since I installed Ubuntu 18.10. I already tried various solutions but with no success.

the sensors command says me that the system is in idle mode above 75 °C. The fan is always blowing. If I have a website with some scripts or several tabs active etc it goes up to 90 °C. If I open a youtube video the system heats up to 98 °C

Previously Win7 was installed I remember there the temperatures during youtube videos were around 80 °C and in idle 55 °C

I tried this: [Laptop running very hot with Ubuntu

I also installed xubuntu because it uses less resources but it is the same problem there.

I changed the grub file like they explain here: GPU overheating with the open source radeon driver

to this

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash radeon.dpm=1"

or this: https://forum.ubuntuusers.de/topic/update-bionic-laptop-nur-noch-heiss/

and around 10 more articles about that problem that I can't find anymore. It seems that it is a problem with the video driver.

The laptop has a Radeon mobility HD 3200 inside. I tried to install the official driver which is a .run file with./ but there is a problem with the versions.h because the files are now relocated in this ubuntu version.

fglrx installation requires that the system have kernel headers. /lib/modules/4.18.0-16-generic/build/include/linux/version.h cannot be found on this system.

I found this article where someone had that problem Amd graphics card installation error on ubuntu 15.10

but it did not work. After I did it I could install the driver but it told me that some errors occurt during installation (but not which). After a restart I just had the console version but the desktop was gone. I had to reinstall the system.

Then I tried this https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-install-amd-radeon-drivers-on-ubuntu-18-10-cosmic-cuttlefish-linux

But nothing works. Now I can't even install the driver anymore because of stuff I did and don't remember. It says:

error: Detected X Server version 'XServer _64a' is not supported. Supported versions are X.Org 6.9 or later, up to XServer 1.10 (default:v2:x86_64:lib32:XServer _64a:none:4.18.0-16-generic:) Installation will not proceed.

Removing temporary directory: fglrx-install.iKW51z

The card is recognized correctly

01:05.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RS780M [Mobility Radeon HD 3200] [1002:9612] (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])

So far no solution

Answer 1

here is an update. And the solution

First I did never try to install the drivers offerd on the HP website. I always tried the on by ATI. Well but also there is a problem while installing the one from HP. I think the problem with the standart driver is, that it does not use the mobility versions of the graphics cards correctly! Because on another computer with a ATI card (but a normal one) I have temperatures around 45 °C in idle

So then I tried the solution with the CPU frequency but I did not really understand how to use it. But it brought me to another idea. Because also I do not want to limit the frequency. After some search I found this:

How do I set the CPU frequency scaling governor for all cores at once?

And that did the trick! Now I have temperatures around 65 °C in idle. And using firefox with multiple tabs around 70 °C. That is okay for me.

I did exactly this:

cpufreq-info

to get informations about the CPU's

It says for core 0 and core 1 that both run between 1.8 GHz and 2.2 Ghz ondemand.

Also there are the possible types of usage displayed. Like available cpufreq governors: conservative, ondemand, userspace, powersave, performance

So then I put this line:

sudo bash -c 'for i in {0..1}; do cpufreq-set -c $i -g powersave; done'

the numbers in the {} stand for the cpu cores 0 and 1. (If another CPU has more cores the last numer needs to be the last core (Nr. 3 for a quadcore, 5 for a hexacore))

with cpufreq-info

I checked again and now both cores run in powersave between 1.8 GHz and 2.2 GHz

Oh and by the way. I changed to Kubuntu 18.04 LTS. Because I messed up the system before while trying solutions.