Problem :
I recently have situation where my laptop can heat to 105 degrees and shut down. I think shutting down is some bios/laptop internal protection, because it doesn’t just gracefully shut down the system, but cut the power off.
Anyway, I wonder if I can configure it somehow to throttle-down CPU if it exceeds some threshold, say 100 degree.
I use Ubuntu 11.10.
Solution :
lm-sensors is a library that should allow you to get your cpu temparature. Conky uses it to do nice little graphs. Once you have the value it should be easy to put a script in the crontab to call the shutdown command which would be cleaner than your bios pull the blug. Not sure about how to throttle a cpu, might be possible not sure might want to google that one.
As a side note, i had the same issue on a dell laptop and it turned out to be the fan clutered with dust, so you might want to open your laptop for a spring clean 🙂