[plug] The New Toy

[Brad Campbell]

Well, I'm on the flight home after the 1st trip with the new toy... 10 Days in Perth.. couple of 11
hour flights, 2 days at Rotto and normal WIFI use the rest of the time..

All I can say is I'm in love.. This VAIO rocks with linux..
I'm using an up-to-date Ubuntu Dapper Beta installed from Flight 7 and pretty much updated.

A 2.6.17-rc4 vanilla kernel with the latest suspend2 and sony_acpi module patches compiled using the
vanilla method (not the "debian way") and a couple of very simple mods to the acpi script to get it
to work with Ubuntu.

I did manage to edit the sony_acpi module so it can power down the CD drive to save about another
150-200mW, but that appears to do nasty things.. I've now got to re-boot the machine to get it to go
again and I have both hdparm and eject sitting in the D state.. :( More homework required I guess.

I'm getting 6.5-7 hours out of the standard battery on in the air (bluetooth and wifi off). With
network-manager installed it works with every wifi network I've thrown at it from wep64 through to
WPA. I still have not got the volume buttons working yet and I have a non-standard mapping on the
multimedia buttons, but in short everything except the inbuilt SD card reader works a treat.

With the extended battery I'm getting about 12 hours off-air and 10 hours normal use. It runs pretty
cool although the fan cranks up a couple of minutes after switch on and pretty much runs full time,
which means it needs a hard surface or to sit on my knee to prevent the underside cooling slots
blocking.

I want to add extra ram to take it out to 1.5GB but only as I have Kontact (with over 4.5k full
contact cards), thunderbird (with a mail dir of over 2GB), firefox (usually have 10-20 tabs open),
OOo, Gaim, Xchat, 5 or 6 gnome terminals and the usual gnome guff loaded full time.. and it tends to
swap a little.. but otherwise it's ok..

I did a normal Debian testing install with windowmaker (which I've been using as long as I care to
recall) to compare side-by-side to Ubuntu and it just took too much fiddling to get the same
functionality.. and I'm getting used to gnome now actually.. it's not quite as bletcherous as I
recall. I tried to install Kubuntu several times but it just died mid-install so I stuck with the
stock Ubuntu install. (I like it actually)

I've even stopped using dselect and got comfortable with apt-cache and the gui front end to
synaptic! Who would have thunk it?

With suspend2 I at least get a progress indicator on my hibernate (which the in-kernel suspend
maintainers just refuse to do) and with the compression it takes about the same time to resume a
fully functional system as it takes to boot XP to a usable bare state (And I can suspend/resume
linux in excess of 50 times and it's all good.. XP starts to flake after about 5-10 suspend/resume
cycles - if it goes that far).

 From powerbutton to grub is 8 seconds (I have a 2 second timeout on grub) so it's 10 seconds from
poweron to kernel start.. it takes another 50 odd seconds to crank up and resume and we are in
business.. I'll try suspend-to-ram sometime and see how that goes I guess.. Reckon I could use that
functionality. This thing is almost small enough to carry as a PDA.

I've had a play with the inbuilt SD reader but nothing serious enough to qualify as getting it to do
anything other than tell me it's there.. Bill, I've seen your stuff on the sdhci list and I'm
following it as time allows.

Not tried the external monitor yet, but I'll get there as time/requirements move it up the list :)

The inbuilt AV mode sucks as a DVD player as it respects region-codes.. xine on the other hand works
just fine :)

Next on the list is to see if I can replace the in-built AV-mode package with something I can cook
up myself.. groovy little mode that one..

I've always stayed away from Sony as I'd heard the hardware is often unsupported by Linux, but this
one has me impressed.. most of it (all the important stuff works out of the box..) "just works".

Oh, and I'm *really* impressed with Ubuntu.. so much so I've installed it on my laptop/server in
Perth and it's now full time on my laptop.. The girlfriend even wants me to shrink her XP partition
and get her set up with it Dual boot also (gotta love *any* girl who actually *asks* you to do that
with no prompting or sales pitch!)

Bewdy

Brad
-- 
"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability
to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable
for their apparent disinclination to do so." -- Douglas Adams