It arrived!

First of all, it’s just great! A truly beautiful piece of hardware. It makes a solid impression, looks elegant and is just great in general. I love it!

It’s a true ultraportable. In the first picture it might look big, but as soon as you compare it to an 15″ macbook pro you see the difference.

And when compared to the average desktop setup of an average developer

you see that it’s the perfect ultraportable. It’s small, it’s light, it’s great.

Setting up everything took a while though. Here are some notes.

Vista

After one hour I couldn’t stand it anymore. Created the two backup DVDs (important!) and wiped Redmond’s latest OS from the harddisk. Vista was constantly doing something and I had no idea what was going on.

XP

My TZ model (UK) fortunately came with an XP CD. I booted and installed it. To my surprise nothing worked after that. I assumed they made a special XP CD with all the drivers on it but after the first boot my Hardware Manager was full of yellow exclamation marks.
However, Sony provides XP drivers on their homepage. I accepted that sell-my-soul agreement, logged in and could then download all the drivers in one big package. On the same page you will find installation instructions. Read them and do exactly what is written there!
When you boot the TZ with a raw XP it doesn’t support *nothing*. No usb, no ethernet, no wlan. That means you have to download the drivers before installing XP, burn it on a CD, install XP and then insert the driver CD where you hopefully saved the installation instructions as well.
After installing all the drivers everything worked. WWAN, camera, wlan, ethernet, suspend, hibernate… Just the microphone didn’t work, you need to change the input device in the audio settings.

Linux

I wanted to install gentoo but to find out which kernel drivers are necessary I started with KUbuntu 7.10 (kernel 2.6.22). I had to set VGA to 600×800 (that gets automatically corrected later) because otherwise X was just active on 1/4 of the screen (which is tiny as the screen is just 11″ anyway).
Most of the hardware was supported out of the box (ethernet, wlan, intel graphics, sound, special keys..) but there were still some issues (wwan) After loading the sony-laptop module they special keys didn’t work anymore and suspend/hibernate just worked half of the time.

Anyway, I installed gentoo with the 2.4.26.3 kernel and everything worked after that. Non obvious kernel drivers are

• iwl4965 for wlan (don’t forget to download the firmware file)
• sony-laptop for special keys (audio and brightness) and advanced features like turn on/off cdrompower, wwanpower
• usbserial for the wwan
• r5u870 for the VCC 7 camera

WWAN

If the WWAN status LED is not active yet, the WWAN chip isn’t turned on. Turn it on by entering
echo "1" > /sys/devices/platform/sony-laptop/wwanpower
the status LED should flash up. echo "0" to turn it off again.

usbserial identifies the wwan card after you turned it on and sets up device entries for it. Anyway, you still need to set up a connection. It took me a while but I finally got it working. In kppp:

• Set up a new modem
• device: /dev/ttyUSB0
• connection speed: 460800

Then on the modem tab press “Modem commands”, set initialization string1 to AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","gprs.swisscom.ch","0.0.0.0",0,0
After that, set up an account. Set the phone number to *99***1# and let the other settings. Save everything, enter “gprs” for the user and “gprs” for the password, press connect and you are online :)

Tags: laptop, sony, vaio