[plug] The New Toy

[W.Kenworthy]

On Sun, 2006-06-04 at 12:24 +0400, Brad Campbell wrote:
> 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.
> 
gentoo rocks too ...

> 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.
> 
using the same version (2.6.16 works fine, but would require patching
for the SD card reader).  Can you point me to the patches as I am using
the standard in-kernel ones and it is not adequate for the ACPI events -
I need to work on this area as it starting to get on my nerves!

> 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.
> 
Have not tried this yet

> 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.
Wireless is great - good range and throughput.  Far better than the so
called 'long range' wg311T (I think) I bought for the dell :(
> 
> 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.
> 
using cpufreq/cpufrequtils and laptop mode - battery life is great after
the two and a bit hours I could get outa the dell.  I am using the
standard battery - I guess well in excess 5 hours when not thrashing the
cpu and disk!

> 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..
> 
1 G is fine for me, but I have 2G of swap, and can throw in a swapfile
when needed.

> 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)
> 
gnome is ok if you can ignore their regular "remove functionality" in
the name of evangelism mentality!  Latest one thats been inflicted on
the is removing the move/copy buttons from the toolbar in evolution
really nice move when you are using a touchpad! grumble mumble grrrr ...

> 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).
> 
sus2 is great - whish they would turf Pavel and sus1 - somewhat like the
gnomes in attitude.  Some things I dont admire about opensource is the
way such dinosaurs can survive - in the commercial world they get their
just deserts ...

>  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.
> 
Again, so much lighter than the dell ... it is a real boon to carry
something so light!

> 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.
> 
I find I have to use the initscripts to stop alsasound, then start the
SD stuff.  And then reverse the process afterwards.  Watch susp2 with it
as well.  I think at this stage its highly experimental, but works.  Its
obviously the SD stuff as existing disk mappings disappear from gnome
when its active.  Wierd - I am waiting on the 2.6.17 release as there
have been a few patches that might help.

> Not tried the external monitor yet, but I'll get there as time/requirements move it up the list :)
> 
Works fine, but I have found that X reads the inbuilt LCD which has a
maximum of 768 vertically, and dumps any modes greater than that for the
ext monitor (modular Xorg 7.) - I have made some changes but need to get
back to work (for my desktop LCD screen) and see how they have gone.
Projectors worked fine, though you need i810switch to enable the socket.

> 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..
> 
Have not tried it yet.

> 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