A few days ago, I purchased a used Thinkpad L490 at a fairly cheap price. It came with an Intel® Core™ i5-8365U (8) @ 4.10 GHz, a Full HD IPS screen, 8GB of RAM, and a 256GB NVMe SSD, along with decent battery life and pre-installed Microsoft Windows. The specs are more than enough for my occasional use, including browsing the internet, remote accessing servers, and tinkering around. What I love most about this laptop is its variety of I/O ports: RJ45, USB Type-C, USB Type-A, microSD reader, and HDMI. There’s no need to buy additional hardware to expand its I/O options.
The first thing I did with the laptop was replace the operating system. After discussing Linux distributions with a friend of mine, I decided to install Fedora 41. I later discovered that Fedora 41 uses BTRFS by default, but I’m not a fan of BTRFS due to some bad experiences in the past. So, I opted to install it with the good old EXT4 file system. The installation process went smoothly with no issues, and everything is working fine, except for the following:
My device is not supported. There is a community-driven driver, but it seems to be abandoned. The error I get is:
Impossible to enroll: GDBus.Error:net.reactivated.Fprint.Error.NoSuchDevice: No devices availableI can live without it, so it’s not a major issue.
I noticed that my fan never spins, and monitoring with s-tui shows that the RPM is always 0, with the CPU always throttled to 1GHz. The error is as follows:
Feb 01 10:02:05 fedora systemd[1]: Starting thermald.service - Thermal Daemon Service...
Feb 01 10:02:05 fedora thermald[110121]: 22 CPUID levels; family:model:stepping 0x6:8e:c (6:142:12)
Feb 01 10:02:05 fedora thermald[110121]: [/sys/devices/platform/thinkpad_acpi/dytc_lapmode] present: Thermald can't run on this platform
Feb 01 10:02:05 fedora thermald[110121]: Unsupported cpu model or platform
Feb 01 10:02:05 fedora systemd[1]: thermald.service: Deactivated successfully.It seems like a serious issue, but I haven’t found a solution yet.
After some research, I found that the thermal issue seems to be a common problem with the Thinkpad L490 and Linux distributions. Here’s the solution I applied:
sudo dnf remove thermaldsudo dnf copr enable abn/throttled
sudo dnf install -y throttled
sudo systemctl enable --now throttled.service# /etc/throttled.conf
[GENERAL]
Enabled: True
Sysfs_Power_Path: /sys/class/power_supply/AC*/online
[BATTERY]
Update_Rate_s: 30
PL1_Tdp_W: 29
PL1_Duration_s: 28
PL2_Tdp_W: 44
PL2_Duration_S: 0.002
Trip_Temp_C: 85
cTDP: 0
Disable_BDPROCHOT: False
[AC]
Update_Rate_s: 5
PL1_Tdp_W: 44
PL1_Duration_s: 28
PL2_Tdp_W: 44
PL2_Duration_S: 0.002
Trip_Temp_C: 95
HWP_Mode: True
cTDP: 2
Disable_BDPROCHOT: False
[UNDERVOLT.BATTERY]
CORE: -100
GPU: -70
CACHE: -100
UNCORE: -70
ANALOGIO: 0
[UNDERVOLT.AC]
CORE: -110
GPU: -80
CACHE: -110
UNCORE: -80
ANALOGIO: 0sudo systemctl restart throttled.service
sudo throttled --monitorI tested it by running a stress test, and as shown in the screenshot, the fan ramps up when the CPU temperature rises, effectively cooling it down. Additionally, the CPU no longer throttles below 1GHz. Everything seems to be working great. What a relief!
Anyway here the fastfetch output:
$ fastfetch --logo none
sumar@mesin-hebat
-----------------
OS: Fedora Linux 41 (Workstation Edition) x86_64
Host: 20Q6S78N00 (ThinkPad L490)
Kernel: Linux 6.12.11-200.fc41.x86_64
Uptime: 6 hours, 53 mins
Packages: 2158 (rpm)
Shell: bash 5.2.32
Display (BOE0791): 1920x1080 @ 60 Hz in 14" [Built-in]
DE: GNOME 47.3
WM: Mutter (Wayland)
WM Theme: Adwaita
Theme: Adwaita [GTK2/3/4]
Icons: Adwaita [GTK2/3/4]
Font: Cantarell (11pt) [GTK2/3/4]
Cursor: Adwaita (24px)
Terminal: tmux 3.5a
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-8365U (8) @ 4.10 GHz
GPU: Intel UHD Graphics 620 @ 1.10 GHz [Integrated]
Memory: 2.10 GiB / 7.40 GiB (28%)
Swap: 0 B / 16.19 GiB (0%)
Disk (/): 61.34 GiB / 224.53 GiB (27%) - ext4
Disk (/run/media/sumar/bootfs): 70.82 MiB / 509.99 MiB (14%) - vfat
Local IP (incusbr0): 10.253.201.1/24
Battery (5B10W138): 89% [AC Connected]
Locale: en_US.UTF-8