[plug] Anybody used linux on a sony vaio VGN-TX27GP/B

[William Kenworthy]

I have it up and running - nice!  It seems as fast as my old 2.2Ghz
dell.  Despite being 1.2Ghz, its a pentium-m (P3 based) on a 400Mhz FSB
against a P4M on a 100Mhz bus - so efficiency wins!  Note that this is
using the exact same system (except for kernel) as the dell so its about
as close a comparison your going to get.  I expect a bit more of a
(slight) gain when I get time to recompile everything as pentium-m.

I used a two week old backup (the one I planned to use was cactus
unfortunately!) - so I am currently catching up on changes etc.

Basically the backup was a (not) selective (enough!) backup of the old
dell via tar.bzip2.  I partitioned the vaio and laid down the backup.
Took 2 goes before I realised it wasnt a network glitch that had killed
the download but a corrupt tarball so third time lucky.  In getting
things running initially, I managed to remove openoffice so there is an
~8hour source build needed to get it back - oh well :(

Built a new kernel and it came up with few errors - mostly because the
hardware was so different to the dell I made a couple of wrong
assumptions.

Hassels: the thing has a weird display dimension of 1366x768 on an intel
915 graphics setup.  Changed over to modular xorg (7.0) and after a
little mode work, the display is now excellent.  Needed to go into the
bios and set a couple of things in order to get a full screen console at
vesa 1024x768 - now looking good).  Modular X is a major major (twice on
purpose!) change and has broken a couple of apps - will find out how
many as I go!  Also had to shrink my (gnome) desktop icons in order to
fit them on the smaller display area (I have gotten too used to
1600x1200).

The ipw2200 mini wireless card took a couple of hours - I eventually
removed the kernel stuff and used the project stuff, updated
wpa_supplicant and rewrote my scripts to use eth1 instead of ath0 and I
am now online using encrypted wireless carrying an openvpn tunnel.  And
no more madwifi - yeah!!!

to do:
The bluetooth modules loaded ok, but I still have to test it.

sound: to be tested - modules were auto-loaded so probably will just
have to massage alsa

card reader

pcmcia (dont really need it coz the wireless is now built in!)

external monitor/projector (for Monday when I get back to work)

The nice part of doing it this way is a the old system was some two
years old and 38Gbytes of finely tuned applications that I use all the
time - so I dont have to spend days chasing down and reinstalling them!

BillK


On Sat, 2006-05-06 at 10:37 +0400, Brad Campbell wrote:
> Gavin Chester wrote:
> 
> >    >I'm installing the _latest_ ubuntu beta on the Vaio as I type