........new to Linux Mint and these forums, so this is my first post.
I came across this thread, and felt I should make a contribution, for what it's worth
I've just installed the latest Mint distro alongside XP pro, and as you might guess for a newcomer there was some messing around to get things right, but none the less Mint is the first distro I tried that won't be relegated to the dustbin......I like this one.
However, during the course of setting up I did notice a statement (somewhere) during a boot-up to the effect: "unable to slow down fan".....now, I too notice a fan speed increase during heavy CPU load, as one would expect, but, and herein lays the observation.....sure enough the fan doesn't slow down again. Checks of CPU load using system monitor confirm there can be no overheating, but the fan remains relatively fast.
I have an ABIT IC7G.....typical P4 board.
I think there is an easy conclusion to jump to, i.e. because the fan is fast, it's easy to think there is heat.
Because of the one-off message I saw, I believe there is indeed a bug, possibly something to do with Mint trying to control fan speed whereas on a normal windows boot fan speed is in the realm of M/B BIOS.
I installed (correctly) screenlets, so as to have CPU widgets, despite many attempts came to the conclusion that software is nothing but a waste of time.........it simply doesn't work, so say hundreds. It might be a good idea if someone could come up with a) a means of keeping fan control in BIOS or at least an option, and b) a widgets package that actually works. That way we might be able to see what is going on.
That aside........my congrats to the Mint team, a major step forward in bringing Linux to a wider user base, well done!