Almlys.org

(En Español)

I have here a new Sony VAIO VGN-CR42Z, working with Debian Lenny.

I'm just going to share a bit my experience with it. I have been using Toshiba laptops over the pasts years, and this is the first Sony VAIO on my hands. I think that it's a good piece of hardware, it may have it's issues, and I have a reserved opinion about the company behind these laptops and the lack of support for specifications or documentation about the hardware. So all stuff that "works", it's by means of reverse engineering.

I'm not sure if you are interested in keeping or not the shitty Windows Vista that comes with it. But since these laptop does not come with recovery disks, I strongly suggest to perform an image of the contents of the harddisk before you do anything with it. It has a recovery partition of about 10GBytes, and also, if you boot into vista it allows you to create 3 recovery DVD's.

In order to install GNU/Linux. The recovery partition is the first one, and the windoze one is the last one, consuming all the disk. You can resize the windows partition very fast within windows vista, using the disk manager. You may also use external partition/resize tools (gparted, qtparted, etc...) from a live DVD linux distro (For example, Ubuntu ships with gparted).

Installing Linux, is a very simple task. You may install from DVD's, or via network. I always install Debian from the network, it's pretty fast, and you don't need to burn any disk.

Now, when you have Linux installed, in my case a 64 bits Debian GNU/Linux, Lenny, this is the list of things that work, and things that do not work. Currently with kernel 2.6.26.

• Wifi: It works out of the box, just after doing "apt-get install firmware-iwlwifi".
• Audio: Perfect, but very soft. You may need an external amplifier if you want to really enjoy it, or just plug your headphones.
• Card Reader: It works, although you may need to add an entry in /etc/fstab to allow the user to mount it.
• Webcam: You need to install this driver. But I going to tell you something, It does not work with the kernel 2.6.26 or higher. Some people report that it works with 2.6.25 or lower.
• Bluetooth: It does not work. I have still not debugged to whole thing. It recognizes it, but is not operative.
• LCD Brightness: The buttons don't work, but I'm able to adjust it with KPowersave
• Extra Multimedia buttons: I have installed the "hotkeys" package, it let's you to customize them to do wathever you want.
• Ethernet: Works out of the box
• Modem: I don't use it.
• Graphics: This machine comes with an ATI X2300. And the required drivers are in the Sid repository.
  • apt-get -t unstable install fglrx-driver fglrx-control fglrx-atieventsd fglrx-glx fglrx-glx-ia32 fglrx-source
  • m-a a-i fglrx
  • aticonfig --initial --input=/etc/X11/xorg.conf
  • Reboot the X Server, and that's all.
  • Remember to install 32 bits compatibility libraries if you want to run 32 bits OpenGL applications such as games, or if you want to use wine.
• External Video Outputs: Them seem to work, and you don't need to reboot the X Server to enable them such it happens with nvidia cards. By using the Catalyst Control Center you can enable/disable them in some seconds, very nice.
• Suspend to disk: Hey, I have still not tested it yet, I am not sure of what I am afraid of.
• Hardware Virtualization (Vanderpool): This model does not have these extensions disabled, so you may use Xen, KVM, Virtualbox and other apps with it's full virtualization power!!! Muhahaha...!!!