Disclaimer: this information is available on an "AS-IS" bases. Nor I nor anyone I'm related with (employer, friends, pets, etc) will be responsible if using this information you will burn your laptop off, or generate a mayor earthquake, and so on. Nevertheless, I hope it helps...
This page is dedicated to tricks and tips to make life with a Sony "old" PGC-FX laptop and linux easier. I started installing a Mandrakelinux 9.2 distributions, than upgraded to kernel 2.6 and to Mandrakelinux 10.0. I now am running kernel 2.6.7, with Con Kolivas -ck4 patchset, and more little change I will relate later. In this page (which is the one you used to have here) I have left the basic installation instruction and glitches, and in this page I will report improvements, news and links to software I wrote and make available to everybody (marked by a link that looks like this.)
Executive summary on 12 jul 2004: I can say it works perfectly. (Well, it has glitches, but hey...). And everybody like screenshots! As ever, the program showing the system logs is my little slogger utility.
The abovemention installation page (yes, again) give advice on how to get basic things up and running; I will not repeat info here. I will just add new and different things.
My kernel is now 2.6.11-rc1 from Linus tree, just a little patch to detect correctly the touchpad, with this config. It works well, suspend-to-disk is very fast, the only problem is that I have to press 8 times the LCD/VGA key before the Suspend key is recognized. I sent a bug report to ACPI and linux-kernel mailing list two times, but had no answers. If anyone can help, please holler.
Last "very good" kernel was 2.6.7 from Linus tree, plus the interactivity patch set from Con Kolivas, plus the patchlet to let the touchpad works (more on this later). Here you can find the configuration file.
Suspend (Hibernate). Vanilla-kernel swsusp is working well for me. It used to had some glitch with the pcmcia card and sound, but now, with 2.6.7, I simply let pcmcia and sound on their own on suspend and they work well after resume: I can suspend with xmms playing and it will resume from where it was playing! Here you can find my current suspend script
I have a WIFI card that require ndiswrapper that is reported to work. And good news are that it works!. Here you will find some instruction to connect to the network of my University, simply adapt it to your needs and you should be on-the-air.
Power management. During this months with
the Vaio, I discovered a series of glitches with the ACPI
kernel functions dealing with power status and suspend. So now
I unload/reload the battery, ac,
temperature and fan modules on
suspend/resume. This has the nasty effect that sometime
cpufreqd dies... I solved this by writing an
home-brew laptop control
daemon.
Touchpad. Our's little touchpad is a much
better input device than it seems. Have a look at the relevant
section on Markus' pages for a complete description.
Basically, you download the synaptic
X11 driver by Peter Österlund, patch the kernel with
the included alps.patch patchset, and recompile
the kernel. I didn't need any additional kernel patches.
Whilst, you change the X configuration file as explained here (read it!) and restart the
X server. If all is ok, the touchpad will work either as a
normal mouse (if the kernel is not alps- and events-enabled) or
like the super-duper touchpad Markus described so well. It's
even better with my gksyn gkrellm applet!
