Alex Hixon’s Blog

from a new Sony VAIO VGN-SZ56GN (aka SZ110 or something later, I’m sure).
Very sexy, just installed Debian. Basically everything but wireless worked out of the box (had to install a kernel module, just a simple apt-get).

Edit: OK, so I lied. Not everything worked as well as I had hoped:

• Had to install the icky NVIDIA driver (and kernel-headers, etc..).
• Create an init script to switch between the Intel and NVIDIA xorg.conf files depending on what the switch was set to on boot.
• Update ALSA kernel modules, so that the PC speaker would mute itself when I plugged headphones in. Haven’t testing the microphone yet, but I suspect that’s been fixed too. Debian came with 1.0.14, and this was fixed in 1.0.15rc3 (which has been released). Also needed to force the vaio version of the driver. A newer version of ALSA has been uploaded by the Debian ALSA maintainers and is waiting to be accepted into sid.
• ACPI events via sony-pi are buggered - need to apply a patch so that the laptop gets detected correctly instead of falling back to an incorrect default. Either that, or use sony-laptop, I forget. (This appears to be patched in the latest kernel release - will get back to you on this one).
• A patch exists to make the Motioneye Camera on this machine appear at /dev/video0, so that other apps can access the webcam, but I haven’t tried nor bothered to get it working yet. I’m sure I’ll get around to it eventually, but it’s not really high priority for me at the moment. (Note: might be fixed by getting the above issue resolved)
• Cannot easily adjust backlight values. If I’m running on the Intel graphics adapter, I can jump into gnome-terminal/xterm/whatever, and run xbacklight -set 50; the NVIDIA card does not have an obviously apparent way to adjust the backlight brightness - it can adjust the screen brightness, but this does not equate to less power used. Using the screen brightness applet causes it to crash. (Related to sony-pi driver).
• Haven’t tried out the fingerprint reader, but I suspect I’ll need to install a driver or two to get that working properly too.

The amount of custom hardware on this machine makes the software issue worse than most other brands though; but the machine itself is pretty hard to beat - nice and light, long battery life, looks good, feature-full, and a full-sized keyboard.

I did also manage to remove the “Windows Vista(tm)” sticker; pretty damn hard mind you.

Edit x2: More detailed information will now live here forever.