Linux on Sony Vaio PCG-TR3E/B

Having had my T40 Thinkpad die on me, I had to resort to an old Vaio as a temporary solution. This particular model seems to be Japanese-only and I had a few issues with it at first. Currently it's running Ubuntu 7.10 pretty happily but I had to upgrade the RAM from 256 meg to 768 meg to make it usable. For reference on the hardware, here's the output of lspci. The following is a list of works and what doesn't.

• Ethernet: works
• Touchpad: out of the box. I don't like the tapping, however. I couldn't disable "tap to click" with the KSynaptics interface but managed it by editing xorg.conf. I fixed it by added the following line to Synaptics Touchpad:
  Option "MaxTapTime" "0"
• USB: works
• Sound: works. I might have had to increase the Mic level.
• CDRW: works. Both reading and writing are fine.
• Keyboard: works; but switched to Japanese when I press Alt+Shift. I don't use the Japanese so I disabled this by commenting out the Fixed by commenting out XkbOptions in xorg.conf. Recognises English USB keyboard without problem (I added both English and Japanese layouts in the KDE control panel).
• Suspend to disk (hibernate): works. Sometimes netorking needs to be restarted once the machine resumes. Just do:
  sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart
• Wifi: tricky. Required the ipw2100 kernel module to be installed, which wasn't a problem. But for a while I thought it wasn't working because Knetworkmanager thought the interface was disabled. I have now found that manually setting the connection in Knetworkmanager will lead to a connection even though it continues to think that the interface is disabled. Kwifimanager will scan and identify Wireless routers. ipconfig and iwconfig give sensible results.
• Screen: tricky. The Vaio has a widescreen display (1280 x 768) but Linux won't recognise this by default and leaves the left and right edges. To fix this I followed the instructions found in other sites (see links below). The following sorted the problem:
  • Install the 915resolution patch: sudo apt-get install 915resolution.
  • List the available resolutions: sudo 915resolution -l
  • Now put the details of the screen into an un-used mode. I did:
    sudo 915resolution 5c 1280 800 32
  • You can check that worked by: sudo 915resolution -l
  • You now need to make this permanent so that it persists across re-boots. I'm afraid I don't remember what I did here. In the links below you'll see people recommend creating /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh and adding the line "915resolution 5c 1280 800" . A grep reveals that I don't have such a line (or anything like it) anywhere in /etc/. I do, however, have /etc/default/915resolution which is symbolically linked from /etc/rc2.d, /etc/rc3.d, /etc/rc4.d, and /etc/rc2.d.
  • Even with the patch running I couldn't get the widescreen display. It turned out that settings needed to be changed in xorg.conf. I finally worked out the "magic combination" and the relevant lines in xorg.conf look like this (the "Modes" line looks funny to me but it works so I'm not complaining):

    
    Section "Device"
    Identifier"Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device"
    Boardname"i810"
    Busid"PCI:0:2:0"
    Driver"i810"
    Screen0
    EndSection
    
    Section "Monitor"
    Identifier   "Generic Monitor"
    HorizSync    20-90
    VertRefresh  50-100
    Option    "dpms"
    DisplaySize  320 210
    Modeline "1280x768" 80.14 1280 1344 1480 1680 768 769 772 795
    EndSection
    
    Section "Screen"
    Identifier"Default Screen"
    Device "Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device"
    Monitor "Generic Monitor"
    Defaultdepth 24
    SubSection "Display"
    Depth 24
    Modes "1024x768@60""800x600@60""800x600@56""640x480@60"
    EndSubSection
    EndSection
    
    

• Screen brightness: works partially: When the screen starts up it's a little dim. You can install the spicctrl package and set the brightness to max by:
  spicctrl -b 255
  To make things easier I have put that command in an ~/bin/brightness and also execute it on KDE startup.
• Bluetooth: not tried
• DVI out: not working. Might well be possible to get working but I've not tried.
• Motion Eye: not working. Probably will never work. I use a Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000 for Skype under Linux. This camera also has a good microphone, making it useful on my desktop PC. The Vaio's mic does work under Linux but I think the Quickcam's may be superior.
• Special keys: not working. Might work with lots of effort but I'm not bothered about these.

Links

• http://www.damia.net/vaio/
• http://hoteldetective.org/katie/linux_sony_vaio_tr3.html
• http://users.skynet.be/thomasvst/linux-on-laptop/: describes the 915resolution patch on a different model.