"Fan Error" - ThinkPad

My laptop is about 2 years old and it was working perfectly fine till today morning. While booting (after the bios loaded) it displayed "Fan Error" and the system automatically shut down. I started the system a number of times but the same error kept occurring.

There was some weird sound coming from the Fan. I guess the Fan must've got stuck due to dust or something. I tapped (quite hard) the laptop from the side a couple of times and surprisingly it started working :)

If you get a similar problem then try this at your OWN risk coz the situation might worsen. Eventually, I guess the fan will have to be replaced but if at all you get it working for once, do take backup of critical data immediately (I did).

Enable External Display on Thinkpad R60 with Linux (Ubuntu 7.10)

Followings steps got my external CRT Display working on ThinkPad R60 with Linux Ubuntu 7.10 installed:

1) cd /opt
2) sudo wget http://www16.plala.or.jp/mano-a-mano/i810switch/i810switch-0.6.5.tar.gz
3) sudo tar -xzvf i810switch-0.6.5.tar.gz
4) cd i810switch-0.6.5/
5) sudo vi i810switch.c
Insert the lines marked in BOLD below:

//#define I865STR "8086:2572"
#define I915STR "8086:2592"
#define I945STR "8086:27a2" //line 63
#define MEMSTR "Memory at"
...
...

i = (p = strstr(*buff_ptr, I830STR)) != NULL ||
(p = strstr(*buff_ptr, I945STR)) != NULL || //line 266
#if defined (I865STR)
(p = strstr(*buff_ptr, I865STR)) != NULL ||
#endif /*defined (I865STR)*/
(p = strstr(*buff_ptr, I845STR)) != NULL;
if (i)
...
...

6) sudo make
7) sudo make install
8) sudo i810switch crt on (turns on the external display)
9) sudo i810switch crt off (turns off the extrenal display)

To allow any user to perform this switch:

chmod u+s /usr/bin/i810switch

I use a simple script to toggle my external display:

STATUS=`i810switch | grep CRT | awk '{print $2}'`
if [ "$STATUS" = "off" ]
then
i810switch crt on >> /dev/null
elif [ "$STATUS" = "on" ]
then
i810switch crt off >> /dev/null
fi