Well, before this laptop I had an Acer TravelMate 254. It was a great one besides it’s weight and the power consumption of the P4 processor. I must say that everything of that laptop works very very fine with Linux.
Now I bought this Sony Vaio SZ-340 (Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz – T7200, 1 Gb of RAM, 100 GB of disk – 5400 rpm, 2 graphis card – intel and nvdia go 7400) and I’ll say somethings about the Linux installation and will write a How-To (since I didn’t found any stuff related to this laptop in google – actually I found about other Vaio’s…)
1. Distribution
The distribution that I really wanted to use was Slackware 11. Maybe sometime in the feature I can install bluewhite64 to test some 64 bit distro. So, the first step was to download disc1 and 2 (maybe the DVD) of the distro at http://www.slackware.com/getslack. You can choose your favourite mirror =).
2. Kernel
Here I had (and still have) a big problem. Actually I’m using kernel version 2.6.18 with SMP enabled. The problem here is that if I enable ACPI the kernel will not recognize the 2 cores that the laptop has. I tried a lot of workarounds like using 2.6.15/2.6.16/2.6.19-rc4 kernels, editing the DSDT table to fix a problem (I still think that the best solution will use DSDT tables), etc… The only way I found to fix this “one core” problem was to use ‘appen=”acpi=off”‘ in my lilo.conf file.
Without ACPI both cores are recognized. But this is not good since a laptop withou ACPI to save some power is not soo useful. You can find attached to this post my .config file, so you can download it. This is better than posting it here.
3. Network/Wireless
The ethernet card worked out of the box, just need to include the sky2 module in the kernel. The wireless is easy to set up also. Just follow the instructions in this page: http://ipw3945.sourceforge.net/ .
4. Sony modules
In order to use all the “Fn” functionalities and others you must install the sonypi module and install some softwares: http://popies.net/sonypi/ . (this didn’t work yet)
5. Graphics Card
The intel graphic card works out of the box and if you just want to use the kernel’s version of the nvidia module it’ll work out of the box also.
But if you want to have all the 3D features etc..etc..etc.. of the nvidia card you must use it’s proprietary driver. To download it just go to nvidia’s site (http://www.nvidia.com) and download it. It’s very easy to install.
If after installing and configuring your Xorg it doesn’t work, probably you’ll need to put another parameter to the kernel: “noapic”…so, at this time your lilo.conf will have: ‘append=”noapic acpi=off” ‘. And then it will work perfectly.
You can find my xorg.conf files here and use my rc.local to detect in which mode you are (stamina or speed) so it uses the correct one. (I used this code from someone in the Internet, but it’s not a big deal =) ).