Comment 4 for bug 670707

A quick google search and you will find this is a common problem with these Toshiba models all over, even in the BSD variants. The threads are in linux forums and even toshiba forums.

Having one myself -- and having it get hot and shutdown without a warning is the only reason I happened onto this thread.

THere is lots of possible hints online, ranging from BIOS updates to various boot arguments. People are even trying to manipulate the ACPI tables. If it works for you, great -- if not then read on, to see what I learned:

Here is what I know, having experienced this on an L300D with "AMD Athlon(tm) X2 Dual-Core QL-60":

BIOS was 1.60 -- upgrade to 1.80 was success, but did not change anything for ACPI CPU fan. (linux does not see and does not control fan -- the "hack" to let it spin up while idle in grub, and then boot linux was as close to success that you got... meaning that it might be OK if you left the CPU 75% idle...

Options you will see in forums, like "acpi_osi=linux acpi.no_check=1" did nothing for this thing -- CPU got to 80+C temps. More if loaded 100%. No real workable solutions here. :(

In the end, the only workaround I found "acceptable" was to boot with "acpi=off" while on AC power, and do the grub-wait-for-the-fan-to-spinup hack while on battery, and then limit battery speed to 1/2 max frequency. Agreed, this is lame, but it is the best one can do with such borked hardware it seems.