Suggestions for more clarifying instructions in readme

[emilianomacht]

For some reason, thinkfan is not provided in debian 11 bullseye. So, I had to compile it myself. Here are some suggestions for the readme, to save some time for future users (I had to google a lot because I'm not an expert user):

1. All libraries needed to compile and install:

sudo apt install git cmake-curses-gui build-essential libyaml-cpp-dev libsensors4-dev pkg-config

It took me a lot of googling to figure those out, especially the last one because it causes some error that cmake tells me to "install yaml-cpp[-devel]", but in fact I had libyaml-cpp-dev installed. Turns out I needed pkg-config, not yaml-cpp.

2. Instead of sudo make install, it's better to use sudo checkinstall. This makes the app install as a .deb package, so it's easier to remove later through apt remove (whenever thinkfan becomes available in debian).

3. For thinkpad users: if systemctl status shows ERROR: Module thinkpad_acpi doesn't seem to support fan_control, execute these three commands:

echo "options thinkpad_acpi fan_control=1 experimental=1" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/thinkfan.conf
sudo modprobe -rv thinkpad_acpi
sudo modprobe -v thinkpad_acpi

4. For thinkpad users: using - chip: thinkpad-isa-0000 as an option under sensors in yaml (and I made sure it worked because the command sensors showed it, like the example config in the repo explains) will throw an error invalid sensor entry. I could not get it to work in any way, so now I'm using this, and it works just as well:

sensors:
    - tpacpi: /proc/acpi/ibm/thermal
      indices: [ 0 ]

[mayonezo]

Well, this would have helped me not spend 3 hours searching the web.

[LloydS42]

I can confirm. I'm not using Debian Linux, but the index starting at 0 instead of 1 helped me a lot. Also the sensor entry chip are described in the example config as well as in the man page does not work for me and is acknowledged with invalid sensor entry.

[vmatare]

Thanks for the feedback. So, (1) is in the README now and (3) has been incorporated into the appropriate error message. What exactly went wrong with (4) I can't tell because for that I'd need the literal config and the exact (and complete!) output with the invalid sensor entry message. I'm ignoring (2) here because that's a Debian-specific thing that Debian users should know, and thinkfan is not a Debian handbook.

Since multiple people seem to have experienced a problem with - chip: thinkpad-isa-0000, maybe someone can get me the full config and the exact error output triggered by it?

[LloydS42]

Hello vmatare,
you can find my thinkfan.conf under issue #214 here. To change the sensor source, I comment out the first few lines and tpacpi on and vice versa - that's what I'm doing. I don't do this consistently across all three labels.
Note: In the example configuration file, the "chip:" keyword is also specified, in addition to the readme file.