Installation report for a Sony Vaio SRX51P

with Ubuntu Breezy 5.10 - written by Franko30

I'm using gedit in this report, but often nano is nice, too.

This laptop works great with Ubuntu: WLAN, display 1024x768, graphics driver, CPU speedstep, LAN, PCMCIA slot, modem, USB, Firewire, touchpad, sound, Bluetooth and even the Memory Stick Reader work "out of the box" or can be configured as described in the following report. An external monitor needs to be connected on startup for having a clone of the Display available. Hibernate needs some tweaking.

Most hotkeys work right away, but some not in the way printed on them: Hibernate (Fn+F12), Print (Print key, saves a screen snapshot), Display brightness (Fn+F5 for darker, Fn+F6 brighter), mute (uses Fn+F2 instead of Fn+F3), volume up (Fn+F3), volume down (Fn+F4), Page up/down (Fn+arrow up or down), Pos1 (Fn+arrow left), End (Fn+arrow right). The Windows key can be configured to open the panel menu via Gnome System Settings.

The SRX51P uses BIOS R0221U2 (how can I turn off the link for the number?), has a 30GB harddisc, an 800 MHz speedstep PIII M low voltage CPU and 256MB RAM.

I completely removed Windows from the harddisc and made a 5GB primary partition for the Ubuntu system. A swap-partition with 764 MB (as suggested by the installer) is used and the rest of the harddisc was used to be the encrypted partition. When using Ubuntu and Windows in a dual-boot setup, bear in mind that you can only have 4 primary partitions on the harddisc (and no logical volumes after that) or you just use 3 primary ones and then several logical volumes.

1. Display and graphics controller

Standard installation of Ubuntu 5.10 was made with suggesting 1024x768 for the X-server.

After installation, Ubuntu 5.10 starts up fine with the graphical user interface working and everything being nice. Nevertheless glxgears for instance is painfully slow - this is not a gaming notebook

2. Automatix

Go to the English or German forums and install Automatix to automatically install Java, Acrobat Reader and other stuf.

3.Synaptics Touchpad

The touchpad works fine after the Ubuntu 5.10 installation.

4. PCMCIA Slot

The PCMCIA slot is installed correctly and does automount when inserting, for instance, a Flash Card.

Unfortunately, Bug #14495 strikes again - the device automounts and disappears half a second later, see http://bugzilla.ubuntu.com/show_bug.cgi?id=14495 (strangely enough this doesn't happen with the Breezy Live CD).

Therefore you have to mount a card manually after inserting.

For instance, make a new directory called 'pcmcia-card' in your home directory. After that (the card still in the slot) mount it with (assuming it's formatted with FAT and it is /dev/hdc1):

sudo mount -t vfat /dev/hdc1 /home/yourusername/pcmcia-card -o uid=yourusername,gid=yourusername

and unmount it with

sudo umount -l /home/yourusername/pcmcia-card

Or simply start the system with the card inserted - then it gets mounted correctly.

5. WLAN

The standard driver works fine. Only WEP, no WPA.

6. Hibernate/Suspend

Suspend (to RAM) does not work - but as hibernate (to disk) works out of the box in 5.10 and is quite fast, this doesn't matter.

Unfortunately, hibernate needs some tweaking.

It behaved quite erratic until I disabled "Should we save and restore state using the VESA BIOS Extensions?" in the /etc/default/acpi-support file. Now the corresponding lines look like this (commented out):

# Should we save and restore state using the VESA BIOS Extensions?
#SAVE_VBE_STATE=true

# The file that we use to save the vbestate
#VBESTATE=/var/lib/acpi-support/vbestate

I don't knwo why this works and what the lines do - but these were the first lines to fiddle with and it worked.

Beware! After installing the Linuxant modem driver, hibernate support m