Linux Install:
Sony Vaio FX210 Notebook

Sony Vaio FX Series Notebooks

The FX series of Sony Vaio notebooks are meant to be complete, all-in-one systems. They have integrated modem, ethernet, removeable floppy drive, and cd/dvd-rom drives. The notebooks are reasonably light and have the option of adding a second lithium-ion battery in the place of the floppy drive for extended portable play. Another cool feature is the IEEE firewire connection that the notebooks support. This makes it easy to connect to a digital camera or movie camera. It sounds pretty cool but it is an option that I have not been able to explore yet since I don't have a CCD equiped camera to experiment with.

Sony notebooks are available in many big time corporate stores like Compusa, BestBuy, and online direct from Sony on the Sony Style website.

Vaio FX210 Specifications

CPU
RAM
Hard Disk
DVD Drive
Video
Display
 		AMD Duron, 800 MHz w/ 128M cache
128M expandable to 256M
10 GB
Hitachi GD-S200 8x
ATI Rage Mobility M1, w/ 8M video RAM
Active matrix, 14.1 inch, 1024x768 (xga)

Operating Systems

The FX210 is shipped with Windows ME pre-installed. I have been using linux for five years now and cannot stand windows. Like LL Cool J says; "I can't live without my radio". I cannot live without linux (or my radio for that matter).

A good friend and I were talking about various linux distros one day and she made the following observation;

"every serious hacker that i have ever come across uses either debian or suse."

Since I'm pretty much a wanna-be hacker, I thought that I'd give debian a shot and at least play the role. I had been using a Caldera release for several years now on my desktop. It has worked well but it has been a hassle to upgrade and configure at times (owing to caldera's unique installation architecture and the large number of changes from release to release). The main problem is that there was no reasonable way to upgrade from one version to the next aside from a new installation. I am also stoked on the idea of using a completely free and community developed release like debian. This is what linux is all about.

Goals for Linux Install

The following is the plan of attack or wish list for the linux install.
Basic linux functionality and X-server configuration. OK: with XFree 4.1.0.1
Winmodem support. NO: Still haven't looked into this yet
Soundcard support. OK: Working with ALSA 0.9.0rc1 drivers
Function key support. Partially: Screen-dimming works ok. volume keys still don't work and I haven't tested much more than that
DVD playback. OK: With Xine. Still not great though. Have some frame skipping issues and haven't worked out good full-screen implementation. I've tried with the Gatos drivers but can't really say if it helped or not.
PCMCIA and USB stuff. PCMCIA seems to work well. I can use my wireless card and extrnal hard drive. I haven't adequately tested USB though. It recognizes devices when I plug them in but I haven't successfully used a USB device yet. I also haven't really tried though.

Hardware Upgrades

Since I purchased my Vaio, I have changed some of the hardware in my machine. I ran out of disk space within my first year of use. I replaced the stock disk drive with a 5400rpm IBM Travelstar hard disk. Installation was not too difficult although I did have to do a fresh install. I attempted to use a product called EZ-Gig to image my existing drive onto the new drive. The idea behind EZ-Gig is brilliant. A pcmcia hard drive adaptor is booted with a provided floppy disk. The existing drive is then imaged onto the new, replacement drive. In practice though, it didn't quite work. My windows partition seemed to survive but it messed up on all of my linux partitions.

Even though EZ-Gig didn't do what it was advertised to do for me, the pcmcia hard-drive adaptor has come in quite handy for the transfer of key files and data from my old setup. I now use my old 10Gb drive as an external drive.

I have also acquired a PCMCIA Orinoco wireless LAN card for my machine.

Current Setup

X-server

I am currently running XFree86 version 4.1.0.1. Everything seems to work pretty well. I am running with a color depth of only 16. I have also had some problems with DVD playback where frames are skipped. I suspect that the hardware memory or acceleration of my grahics card is not being used.

I intend on using the gatos.org drivers on my system. It looks like this could provide smoother playback of DVD's.

Here is a copy of my current XF86Config file.

Win-Modem

So far I've not really messed around with this. I know it is possible. A friend at work has his modem working on a very similar FX Vaio. I have little motivation though to get this working on my machine.

Soundcard

I was able to get my sound card to work with a minimal amount of trouble using the ALSA drivers. ALSA documentation is pretty good and can be found on their website, alsasound.org.