• xorg.conf.stamina
• xorg.conf.speed
• /proc/config.gz (for gentoo-sources 2.6.24-r9), as I gave up on ubuntu

Not working:

• Thumbnail reader (sony uses proprietary key in the hardware)
• Felica card
• Adjusting monitor brightness
• Hard disk active protection

Have issues:

• Camera quality is way inferior to the quality available with the windows software
• iwl3945 fails randomly
• on ubuntu kernels, there is bug 177895, which makes cpu drain power fast. with gentoo-sources everything is normal.

Everything else works fine.

I had to switch notebooks because of the regular stinkpad hardware failure. With one motherboard, one LCD panel, one hard disk controller, two power adapters and a hard drive replaced in less than two years, I can only wish Lenovo good-bye and good luck. The stinkpads are not what they used to be.

Unfortunately, I did not have much time to look or shop around, so I ended up with the first machine that looked like it will do what I need, and was available in the shop at the moment. As it happens, it is a Sony Vaio VGN-SZ55B. Some years ago I had upgrade problems Sony hardware and decided to stay away from them for a while. I was surprised to find out this notebook uses pretty standard components. Seems Sony have learned a lesson or two.

Update: Added a picture of the notebook running some random Linux distro with a cool desktop background picture of the M101 galaxy, stolen shamelessly from the awesome NASA apod site.

Allright, now back to the notebook.

Things I don’t like:

• Heavy (2 kg with battery). The adapter is heavy too.
• Useless battery life (only 3.5 hours in low-performance mode)
• Has some built-in hardware I don’t need (interface to Felica, an e-payment system in Japan).
• Only has 2 USB ports and no DVI or HDMI.
• The motion eye built-in camera (which I remember fondly from the first “subnote” I had back in the 20th century, a Sony PCG-1) doesn’t rotate.
• Glossy monitor (so I can see my face on the camera, and then again reflected in the monitor).
• Uselessly sensitive touch pad.
• The DVD drive can’t be removed. Actually, I found that having a DVD is most welcome when travelling abroad and taking pictures.
• Bluetooth and wireless lan are turned on/off with the same switch (sometimes I use bt _instead of_ wi-fi).
• Microsoft tax, in the form of office personal 2007, which I totally don’t need, and Vista Home Premium, for which I can still find a use or two. [update] I removed the windows partition to free some disk space.
• Duplicate hardware, most obvious being
  • the separate holes for Sony’s memory stick and SD media (and the SD media slot supports the stick too);
  • the two video adapters – Intel x3100 (for low power consumption) and Nvidia 8400M. Actually, I got used to the dual adapter.

Things that are okay:

• 3GB RAM upgrade included in the price; more RAM never hurts.
• Has bluetooth, which, until recently was rare on Japanese notebooks.
• Sony finally supports media other than the useless memory stick.
• The high-performance (to me, anyway) video. I hope Duke Nukem Forever plays fine. [update: it does, I used the eduke32 clone]
  • Actually, some useful software — the Stellarium planetarium software and Celestia — look very good with the Nvidia video card.
• 160GB disk
• Integrated web camera.
• The touchpad driver for X has a ton of useful options, including sensitivity tuning
• Every interface I need at the moment.
• Actually, the monitor isn’t bad at all
• The sony-laptop kernel modules allows for various hardware items to be switched off independently of each other. That includes the BT, wifi and the DVD drive.

Misc.

• Haven’t really tested the battery yet, but I’d expect the performance will be far off the 5.5 hours on the specs. I hope I’m wrong. Update: I wasn’t
• I don’t like the ton of stickers on the notebook. All these “Vista ready”, “Intel outside” and what not — stick them on the box, please.
• The chrome-plated logo on the back of the monitor is way too shiny.
• I really wanted a notebook with OLED backlight, unfortunately such was not available in stock. Biccamera is too careful about overstocking.

The Windows ™ Vista ™ Home Premium ™ ™ ‘xperience

Windows booted normally, and worked more or less okay on the first try. Didn’t experience any of the horror Vista stories I’ve read about. The Aero interface performed equally well on both adapters, but I was underwhelmed. It isn’t a big deal, beryl was much scarier visually a full year and a half ago, and it ran on a i915 chipset, too.

I had a note attached, which asked me to perform a Sony Update ASAP. I tried, and it failed multiple times. So I’m giving up on the Sony update service for now.

Installing Linux

What is working:

I didn’t have time to install Gentoo this time around, so I went with Ubuntu instead. Back to Gentoo now. Networking, bluetooth, video, audio (still with a glitch, see below) and the rest of the standard hardware (usb, firewire, dvd, flash storage ports) were discovered by the installer properly. That even included the Sony special keys.

I had to do one simple tweak to get the dual video working — basically I wrote a small 3-line shell script to detect the active adapter (by greping lspci) and switch the X gl libraries (symlinking the correct libraries) via eselect.

The motion eye camera turned out to be Ricoh web camera. A driver is available, and I almost have it working, using the development version and just following the build instructions on the website verbatim. Playback seems to work with the v4l2 interface only; the old v4l interface produces garbage output or errors.

Update: the linux uvc video driver (official in 2.6.26) supports the camera better, and compiles all the time, unlike the r5u870. So, use that instead.

What is not working yet:

I have yet to setup the thumbprint reader. Also, to my huge annoyance, inserting a headphone plug does not do anything useful. I can’t hear sound in the headphones, and the speakers keep on working. Headphone fix: newest alsa + add the model=vaio option to the snd-hda-intel module.

Backlight control fix:

• For the nvidia, nvidia-settings
• For the intel video – xrandr with the  –set BACKLIGHT_CONTROL native|legacy option