Banshee and heat rising to shutoff

Solution 1:

There are some one-time operations in Banshee that are very CPU-intensive and can last for several seconds, or even minutes depending on the size of your music collection.

BPM Detection

Detecting the tempo of a song can be helpful if you want to automatically generate a playlist such as "Upbeat" or "Slow and Relaxing." The downside is, running beat detection on a large library can max out your processor for a sustained period of time. Also, I've never found beat detection to be terribly accurate (has problems with subdivisions of beats).

BPM Detection can be disabled under Edit > Preferences > Source Specific. In the Music preferences, make sure "Automatically detect BPM for all songs" is not checked.

Mirage Similarity Engine

This is a plugin, so it shouldn't be installed unless you made a special point of installing it. It's great for creating automatically generated playlists of songs that sound similar to each other, but similar to BPM Detection, it will do a one-time analysis of your music library that can be very taxing for your CPU. You can disable the extension in Edit > Preferences > Extensions.

Library Watcher bug

A few people are experiencing a Library Watcher bug That causes high CPU usage and extremely high memory consumption. You may want to try disabling the Library Watcher extension in Edit > Preferences > Extensions.

The spinning throbber

In Banshee's lower left corner, a spinning throbber will appear when Banshee is working on something like downloading cover art or syncing a device. If BPM detection and Mirage analysis weren't the source of your high CPU usage, I'd look for the throbber. If it's there, you can hover over it to see what Banshee is working on.

Playback CPU Bug

For some people (myself included), Banshee's CPU usage during playback is high compared to other gstreamer-based media players. The comments in that bug report seem to suggest that Banshee uses 20-25%, which is more than Totem at <10%. Disabling 'Write metadata to files' in Edit > Preferences might help fix this problem, but 25% CPU shouldn't be enough to cause your laptop to overheat unless it has extremely poor ventilation.

If none of these things fix the problem, I'd open up Gnome System Monitor and watch the CPU usage of the banshee-1 process to see if it's doing anything crazy. If it seems abnormally high and it isn't one of the issues I listed, you may need to file a new bug report. Good luck, and let us know if anything works!

Solution 2:

The fan on the toshiba l300d does not work properley under Ubuntu in most cases, causing the computer to overheat, and sometimes shutdown unexpectadly. I have had this problem with ubuntu 9.10, 10.04, and currently 10.10. I haven't tried 11.04 yet, but i suspect the issue is still unresolved. Two things have worked for me.

In terminal: gksu gedit /etc/default/grub, then in the edit the line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" 

to read: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_osi=" and run: sudo update-grub and restart.

This should get the fan running from startup, but the function keys won't work (can't adjust brightness and stuff).

If you want the function keys to work you can do this by editing the same line in /etc/default/grub to read: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash acpi_osi=Linux" the down side of this command is that in order to get the fan to work, each time you start up laptop, you need to press fn+f3 to suspend and then resume the computer.

These are the only work arounds I know. they work in ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10