Here is a little more about that laptop fan issue.

I reloaded the laptop and lost the little program I made to control the fan when the CPU gets too hot.  Not a problem it was really simpe, or I would have made an attempt to save it before the reload.  As I was getting ready to write it again I decided that, since there is an embedded controller that will turn the fan on automatically, but at way too high a temperature, I would try to see if there is a way to set the temperature points.  Turns out there is a way, but it wasn't accepting my input.  So I looked into the souce code for the kernel driver that handles ACPI and found the place where they read in the new trip points.  Turns out the code assumed a small fixed number of inputs, so I re-wrote it to accept enough inputs to keep my equipment happy.  That worked great.  Now the fan does all the things it is supposed to do, and at the temps I choose.

Then while I was trying to get my wireless card to operate in promiscuous mode I discovered that the kernel driver for ACPI is patched the same way I did in the latest version.  Yay open source.  I could fix it myself when I needed to.  I also have a sorta peer review process to see that my fix was pretty good because the same thing was added into the official code by someone else who's work was also peer reviewed before it was included.

Now if I can just get this wireless card working the way I want...