laptop-mode disabled in kernel?

[marc]

In Dapper, my laptop fan never turns off after the first few minutes. It 
is always on. Whereas, in Windows, it rarely comes on. I'm pretty sure 
that this is because the disk never spins down.

In an effort to diagnose the problem, I thought to install laptop-mode. 
However,
# laptop_mode start
returns that it is disabled - although not in what way. A look at 
# cat /proc/sys/vm/laptop_mode
returns zero, which I understand means that laptop_mode is switched off 
in the kernel.

I'm using the standard 386 kernel from the CD. Is there any point in 
moving to the 686 kernel in an effort to fix this?

Back to the disk. There's only one active ext3 partition plus swap - all 
other partitions are noauto. I've tried noatime and commit=600, but to 
noavail. Any ideas?



-- 
Best,
Marc