Installing Linux on recent Sony Vaio Notebook Computers

Please go to the project's

News:

• Wed Aug 16 2000: An important new page by Alex. Alex, was there ever any consensus on whether BIOS upgrades are worthwhile?
• Mon Jun 5 2000: More sound news - Jeffrey Baker reports that the new ALSA driver 0.5.8 (from CVS) now supports the z505hs. On a personal note, I've decided that I don't like touch pads.
• Thu Apr 12 2000: Great news! Dev Mazumdar (the president of OSS) has fixed the sound drivers for release 393j so they don't clobber APM, using a machine generously provided by EmperorLinux.com. I have tried this driver and it does end the crashes, though I haven't confirmed that everything still works after a suspend.
• Tue Mar 28 2000: Things are much improved with the 2.3.99 kernel, but I suspect that sound will still crash the machine, and networking still gets wedged. At least I can insert and eject PCMCIA cards and suspend and resume with reasonable confidence.

Software:

• My Linux distribution is redhat 6.2 (zoot).
• Linux kernel 2.3.49 needed to get resume to work at all,
• Sound driver for Yamaha YMF744 chip by OSS, with the Yamaha YMF724 add-on module.
• The PCMCIA package is now part of the kernel, I think its number is 3.1.11.
• Ethernet module is eepro100.

Configuration:

• You will need to put the BIOS into ``non-plug-and-play'' mode to get the latest OSS sound drivers to work, or if your kernel is older than 2.3.51 to get the ethernet to work. Go into the BIOS (by hitting F2 when the Sony logo is on the screen) and look at the ``Advanced'' screen.
• To get the ethernet card working put

  alias eth0 eepro100

  in /etc/conf.modules
• Because I don't have a CD-ROM drive, I installed Linux (Redhat version 6.2) via ethernet. I had to use an external PCMCIA ethernet card and the pcmcia.img floppy. There is a report that a beta version of Mandrake allows installation using the eepro100.
• FYI, here is the output of dmesg for my machine.
• Here is a patch against the default configuration file (arch/i386/boot/defconfig) of kernel version 2.3.99-pre6-3 that brings the settings reasonably close to building a good kernel and PCMCIA subsystem for this machine. Also see this message about USB. Please forward any improvements.

Bugs:

• According to Todd and Dan, the KDE desktop will prevent the OSS sound drivers from working. Gnome will not. I use neither. [Any improvement with the latest OSS drivers?]
• After a resume, machine hangs when the eepro100 module is installed. In fact, rmmod-ing and insmod-ing the eepro100 module also hangs the machine. Here is a grumpy message from the one and only Don Becker on the subject, pointing to a more suitable eepro100 driver. It looks pretty old, though -- if anyone tries this out please let me know.
• Inserting or ejecting PCMCIA cards causes the machine to hang. Adding

  PCIC_OPTS="cs_irq=11"

  to /etc/sysconfig/pcmcia has solved this problem for Todd Small, but not for me. The card I've tried inserting and removing is a SCSI adapter, maybe I should try something else. Stopping pcmcia card services using /etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia stop and then ejecting the card does not hang the machine.

Resolved Bugs:

• With kernels prior to 2.3.50 you had to turn the machine off (cold boot) to reset the ethernet card after running Windows.
• The latest OSS driver (393j) fixes crash on APM suspend.
• Very late development kernels improve the PCMCIA insert/eject situation.

Links

• Kenneth Harker's Linux on Laptops site.
• Linux.org's laptop page
• linux-notebook.org
• Linux Hardware Database
• Linux Status of Laptop Hardware by Werner Hauser

Help!