JuanjoAlvarez.net

The laptop does fairly well for a new laptop with a distribution that has been for some months on the market. The installation on disk of the Live goes without any problem, but it leaves X without Beryl or Compiz and on 1024x768 (pretty ugly here) resolution. KDE4 plasma also works well but the developers say it's better to set the environment variable KWIN_NVIDIA_HACK to 1 on your .xinitrc

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The lack of compositing is due to the fact that the Nvidia propietary driver is not installed; after installing it and running drak3d to enable Compiz & Beryl all worked as expected (with this screen and this graphical capabilities Beryl is wonderfull here.)

In my system emerald didn't work at first, but after some googling I make it work following these steps:

1. Run this command:

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.orig; 
sudo nvidia-xconfig -composite; 
sudo nvidia-xconfig -allow-glx-with-composite; 
sudo nvidia-xconfig -render-accel; 
sudo nvidia-xconfig -add-argb-glx-visuals

2. Edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf and change the "DefaultDepth" in the section "Screen" from 16 to 24. In the same section add: Option “AddARGBGLXVisuals” “True”

After this, emerald should work.

The resolution was fixed editing the /etc/X11/xorg.conf and prepending every line with the 1024x768 resolution (and the others) with "1280x800". After a service dm restart the resolution was 1280x800.

The WIFI, the bluetooth and the ethernet cards work without a glitch as detected an configured by Mandriva & KDE. I'm using the IPW3945 driver with the WIFI. I tried the newer IWL3945 driver but it didn't worked for me (the driver loads but the light stays powered off and no link is detected.) Update: After a reinstall of Mandriva 2008.1 iwlconfig comes selected by default and works. There are some disconnects from time to time (fixed just reconnecting to your wifi).

The Fn key combinations doesn't work so by the moment I'm unable to change the brightness (the sonypi and sony_acpi modules doesn't work with this laptop.). Of the multimedia keys the volume, pause/play, stop, and fw/rw are detected so you can map them on Kmix shortcut options of other apps. For mapping the rest of multimedia keys not detected by default ("S", "AV MODE", etc.) you have to put this into your xorg.conf:


Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Vaio keys"
Driver "evdev"
Option "Name" "Sony Vaio Keys"
Option "XkbLayout" "jp"
Option "XkbModel" "jp106"
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
...
InputDevice "Vaio keys" "SendCoreEvents"
EndSection


Thanks to Thomas for this hint.

Suspend to disk and suspend to RAM work perfectly WITHOUT the Nvidia propietary driver but for the moment are not working for me with it (suspend to disk never go to the point of being suspended, hanging the system before, and suspend to RAM suspends the system well but the screen goes black restoring it. Also, if you go to the text console with ALT+CONTROL+F1 and suspend, it works there, but as soon as you try to go again to the X console it hangs (or get a 100% white screen). Update:With the kernel 2.6.26-RC+ and the latest NVIDIA drivers now suspend to RAM works perfectly and never hangs on resume.

The webcam worked after I dowloaded the R5U870 driver HERE uncompressed it, applied the patch linked HERE, compiled it with make and installed it with make install (you'll need to kernel source headers package for it to success.) Later, modprobe didn't find the r5u870 module so I put this on /etc/rc.local so it's loaded at boot:

modprobe videodev
modprobe video-buf
modprobe v4l1-compat
modprobe v4l2-common
insmod /lib/modules/2.6.17-13mdvcustom/extra/r5u870.ko

After this, it worked for me (tested with Kopete and aMSN.)

The sound works. Initially it had a problem: when you connect the headphones to the output jack the main sound output didn't mute. But thanks to the help of Thomas Moulard (thanks again!) I fixed it. You need a recent version of the kernel (2.6.24+) and to have this on the file /etc/modprobe.conf:

options snd-hda-intel model=vaio

The rest of the hardware doesn't give any problems. I've yet to test the HDMI port and the SD/Sony card readers, but since the later seems to be detected I don't think it'll give any problem.

Comments (specially if you know how to fix the suspend+nvidia or the Fn brightnesss) to: juanjux@gmail.com