SRA Lab Open Source Code

Vaio FZ11S

At work, I use a shiny Vaio laptop, style and power are at rendez-vous:

• Core 2 Duo T7100 (1.8 GHz)
• 2 Go PC2-5300
• NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GT
• 15.4" 1280x800 X-Black LCD

The goal of this post is to save my notes somewhere and maybe help someone else to configure a similar laptop under GNU/Linux.

Tips

Tips to install Linux on this shiny laptop (based on various forums). I installed a Gutsy Gibbon:

• NVIDIA 8400GT - Compiz works really nice with latest NVIDIA drivers (proprietary): 100.14.19. To avoid some conflicts, add this line DISABLED_MODULES="nvidia_new nvidia_legacy" in "/etc/default/linux-restricted-modules-common" (best method), you can also manually removed previous modules provided with the Ubuntu, rm -rf /lib/linux-restricted-modules/`uname -r`/nvidia_* (I'm not sure about the path)
• Motion Eye camera - fully working with this driver: r5u870-0.10.0.tgz (http://lsb.blogdns.net/files/r5u870-0.10.0.tgz), but you have to change a file before compiling it:
  $ cd [the directory where you have downloaded the driver]
$ tar xzvf r5u870-0.10.0.tgz
$ cd r5u870-0.10.0
$ vim r5u870_md.c
  In file "r5u870_md.c", at line 1196 change ".default_value = 0" with ".default_value = 1" and after line 3015 add "{ R5U870_DEVICE_UVC(0x05CA, 0x1837, R5U870_DI_VGP_VCC4) },". Then:
  
$ sudo make
$ sudo make install
$ sudo modprobe r5u870
  Or, if you want the module loading at startup, add "r5u870" in "/etc/modules". I've tested the camera with Ekiga.
• Sound HDA intel - The speaker sound is horrible but the jack doesn't work so I installed alsa-driver-1.0.15 (you can only compile snd-hda-intel to reduce compilation time), I also removed the module provided by Ubuntu, rm /lib/modules/`uname -r`/ubuntu/media/snd-hda-intel/snd-hda-intel.ko. Add this line to /etc/modprobe.d/options, options snd_hda_intel model=vaio.

Keyboard and Synaptics touchpad - fully working
Matshita blu-ray cd/dvd - fully working
Nvidia 8400 - fully working
Ethernet - fully working
Bluethoot - fully working
Wifi - fully working
Media button - fully working
Usb - fully working
Fn keys - partially working (only mute key works)
Sound - fully working
Suspend, hibernate - working (but more testing is needed to say it's really stable with 2.6.22-14)

I sent an ACPI dump to [2] to be able to set LCD brightness...
Don't forget to reduce power consumption (www.lesswatts.org)

[1] http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-486861.html
[2] http://www.linux.it/~malattia/wiki/index.php/Sony-laptop
[3] http://forum.ubuntu-fr.org/viewtopic.php?id=150704