Laptop's temperature and otheres..

Hi guys! I gotta say that Knoppix is VERY cool. I've been using Linux for quite a while, currently I'm using Gentoo at home and told my teachers to _buy_ Knoppix (whoohoo) at school =) Anyway. I have a little problem with my laptop.
It's an Acer Aspier 1300 with Athlon XP 1400+. In Windows it runs @ 1.2 Ghz sometimes, and @ 450Mhz sometimes (when on battery). The problem is that Knoppix doesn't detect when I switch to battery and as a result, I run out of power in quite short time. And another problem (almost more important then that battery stuff) is that the fan is never ON! And that makes the CPU quite warm after a while, and since I'm afraid of my new laptop I have to shut it down after 15 minutes or so.... What can I do to see the temperatre?? gKrellm?? Actually I never had to check it since my old desktop is to old to check its CPU's temp... But now I *have* to check it!
What can I do to get it working?? Please help me since I want to use Knoppix but I *don't* want to burn my CPU =)
Cheers,
Jacob

how do you have this working in gentoo ?

Ohh I don't I have Gentoo on my desktop. But as far as I can see from Gentoo forums, guys use /proc/acpi . And Knoppix only has APM as far as I know...

As for the speed switching, I'm not sure if linux currently supports this ( at least not in the 2.4.x series ).. As for the fan, my laptops fan switches on and off automatically, without acpi.. Maybe check your bios to see if you can enable APM and use that instaed of ACPI. Also, it would be very strage if your hardware didn't control the fan automatically, and relied on the OS to do this.. What would happen if Windows crashd and didn't start the fan up?

Yea, you're right. The problem is that the BIOS is kinda strange...I can only set the time, date and which device I want to boot from =) Nothing else...I guess it must be some way to access stuff like ports, memory, fan control, thermal zones and so on from BIOS.
And now when you said this, it came on my mind that even while Windows's booting up the fan goes on and works for a while just to cool down the CPU a bit. So it might be hardware-detected.
Thanks eadz, your help is appriciated.

Maybe you can convince Christian to port Speedswitch XP to Linux?
http://www.diefer.de/speedswitchxp/index.html

Holy shit...It would be nice to have something like that! But there's something I don't get...it *must* be something like SpeedswitchXP for Linux...It has to.... If not, then it's the first Windows app which doesn't has anything similar in Linux, I think.

I know for Dell laptops there are also the i8kutils that let you monitor the temp and fans.

http://www.goof.com/pcg/marc/speedstep.html

This may help.
Also you may be able to get temp readings by installing the sensors package for linux and compiling the modules for the sensor in your laptop. On my router, I have this reading:

[root@router root]# sensors
via686a-isa-6000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Algorithm: ISA algorithm
CPU core: +1.47 V (min = +1.50 V, max = +2.49 V) ALARM
+2.5V: +2.46 V (min = +2.24 V, max = +2.74 V)
I/O: +3.30 V (min = +2.95 V, max = +3.62 V)
+5V: +5.02 V (min = +4.47 V, max = +5.49 V)
+12V: +11.57 V (min = +10.79 V, max = +13.18 V)
CPU Fan: 2812 RPM (min = 0 RPM, div = 2)
P/S Fan: 0 RPM (min = 3000 RPM, div = 2)
CPU Temp: +54.1°C (limit = +60°C, hysteresis = +55°C)
SYS Temp: +41.8°C (limit = +45°C, hysteresis = +40°C)