I have a dual-boot Mac OS X 10.8 and Kubuntu 12.10 64x on my white MacBook from mid-2010 installed. (Model identifier: MacBook7,1 . I have upgraded my RAM from 2GB to 8GB, if that matters.) I have the proprietary NVIDIA drivers installed on my Kubuntu.
Judging from the temperature monitor widget in Kubuntu, my temperature seems to be ~10℃ hotter compared to under Mac OS X. In Mac OS X I use Temperature Monitor. I'm comparing the CPU Core 0 and CPU Core 1 values in Kubuntu to the CPU Core 1 and CPU Core 2 values in Mac OS X.
10℃ more may be not a very big overheating disaster, but when I do really intense things on my computer (such as playing Team Fortress 2 a while) my CPU is at ~70℃ on OSX, and when playing it a while on Kubuntu, my CPU is ~80℃. I worry that the higher temperature may shorten the lifetime of my laptop.
I did some research and found out that it may be that I installed it in BIOS mode, which causes the heat. I can't install it in EFI mode, because the propietary NVidia drivers don't work then (already tried that, it gave a black screen). Does anyone know how to get the propietary NVidia drivers work in EFI mode?
Edit: Ok, even if there isn't a way to use the proprietary nvidia drivers in EFI mode (doesn't seem like there is a way to do it, I'm not getting any answers), I would already be happy if the heating could be fixed in BIOS mode. How can I at least fix the heating in BIOS mode?
I tried putting this in my xorg.conf in the Device section to enable power saving:
Option "DPMS" "1"
Option "RegistryDwords" "EnableBrightnessControl=1; PowerMizerEnable=0x1; PerfLevelSrc=0x2233; PowerMizerDefault=0x3"
...but that didn't work.
Oh, and I'm not using rEFIt by the way, could it be that?