GNU/Linux on a Sony PCG300 laptop

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	Links and more detail to come.

	I have a nice <i>Sony</i> laptop, with <i>Windows XP</i> on it. 
	XP is fine on laptops as it has many handy features, 
	e.g. suspend, and speed steps etc.

	However as a <i>Linux</i> nut, I needed to have a proper
	developers OS. As a heavy user of <i>SSH</i> and <i>X Server</i> 
	tunneling, I needed to get Linux installed on it.

	Fortunetly the machine already did have Linux installed 
	on it. A previous owner had installed an earlier version
	of <i>Mandrake</i>. So I knew the laptop would work with Linux.
	I could have gone the easy way and kept the already installed
	OS, however that is no fun, and I prefered a more up to date
	flavour. 

	I have used Mandrake for many years and it was my first choice
	distribution. I already owned a copy of Mdk 10.0 Official,
	so I set upon installing it.

	There a plethora of How-tos on the internet regarding linux
	on laptops, of which this is perhaps one as well now.
	Many of the cover Mandrake, and if I can find them again
	I will list them here.

	Generaly I take sections of many howtos, as rarely a single guide
	suites me perfectly.

	Installing Mdk 10.0 from the CDs was staight forward, 
	without any tweaking. I had a working environment straight away.

	None of the laptops special features are however installed
	by default. Further installation was needed for the jogdial 
	to work, the special blue buttons for sound, brightness, 
	power off, etc, some modules for power saving options were 
	also needed.

	<i>Sonypi</i> is a module written to support Sony laptops 
	special buttons and also managing the screen. It has been
	added to 2.6 kernel,  but not the one that came with mine.
	So it was a case downloading it and installing it as a 
	kernel module. 

	Enabling the <i>cpufreq</i> module may help more powerfull 
	machines to	conserve power by regulating the speed of the 
	CPU when more idle. Also you can save nbattery power by
	enabling and configuring <i>ACPI</i> to flick the brightness on 
	the LCD screen lower when on battieries, to idle the hard 
	disk when not access for awhile etc.

	When I had installed all these setup, the laptop was a fully
	functioning Linux laptop.

	Next on my list was to aquire a <i>WIFI</i> card and get it 
	working under linux.  After some research I was sure the 
	<i>Atheros</i> chipset on <i>3com</i> cards would work.
	
	I was wrong. Using the <i>MadWIFI</i> module to support the 
	Atheros chipset, I was close to get it working, but didnt. 
	After	some time wasted, I gave up, and derived that since 
	MadWifi is part of a later kernel version I better wait till I
	rebuild the laptop. (Hey its been working for 3 months, time
	for a change!...)

	Mdk 10.0 comes with Kernel 2.6.3-7 and can be upgraded to 
	2.6.3-19. However newer kernels have many more laptop specific
	engancements. E.g <i>Lapmod</i> which among its features
	queues hard disk request so that it doesnt start to spin up
	again every 5 secs when logs etc accesses the disk.
	Also newer versions of MadWifi and Sonypi is buildt in.

	I could have upgraded to Mdk 10.1 which would be easier,
	but I didnt want to pay for the Official again, and again.
	So I decided to use <i>Gentoo</i> after building a <i>MythTVi</i>
	box using Gentoo.


	And this is where I am, I havent done the Gentoo install yet.




Ref: 

http://sauvy.ined.fr/~brouard/sony/

http://tuxmobil.org/sony_vaio_vgn_a190_linux.html

http://www.sony-tools.homeunix.net/sony.html#sonyxosd

http://www.littleredbat.net/mk/linux/gentoo_vaio.html

http://www.ma.umist.ac.uk/bl/vaio/Linux_on_my_Sony_v505cp.html


	
	

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