Installing Debian Linux on a
Sony VAIO PCG-R505TEK
Introduction:
I inherited a couple-year-old Vaio recently from a coworker. It was running
an old install of Redhat 7.1 with partial support for the various Vaio extras.
I chose to reinstall to the current Debian in order to access more of the
features of the machine. A number of web pages were useful to me in this
task; I'm putting this online in the hopes of helping others out as well.
Status:
After one weekend's work, pretty much everything works: X, network, audio,
power management, the jog wheel, and the docking station CD/DVD drive. I
haven't tested the USB functionality (no USB periphs) or DVD playing yet.
The following instructions assume you are familiar with installing a new
kernel. If not, see here.
Initial Debian Install
The initial install is sort of tricky, given that the computer itself has
no floppy or CD drives. You need the docking station in order to install.
I docked it and used a set of the Debian install floppys to get things started,
before switching over to a network install to download the rest of the system.
I used the eepro100 network driver, which worked - sorta. Which is to say
that it would download for a few minutes, then stop working for five or ten
minutes, giving lots of timeout errors, then resume working again for a bit,
and so on. This is a frequently-reported problem with R505s and the eepro100
driver.
My solution was to do a very minimal network install, just enough to get
the base system up and running, and then immediately upgrade the kernel to
the more recent 2.4.18 Debian kernel package, which fixes most of the networking
difficulties.
Debian newbies, you do a kernel upgrade thus: apt-get install kernel-image-2.4.18-686
kernel-pcmcia-modules-2.4.18-686install those (you may need to add a
line "initrd=/initrd.img" in your /etc/lilo.conf) and then reboot. The network
driver for the 2.4.18 kernel is much much happier and will allow you to
proceed with the rest of the install successfully
However, even in the upgraded state, I sometimes still saw timeout problems.
So I switched to the 2.4.20 kernel (as needed for ACPI and other fixes, detailed
below) and changed to the Intel e100 driver instead. I haven't seen any networking
problems with this configuration.
Video card / X Windows
X installed painlessly. Choose the i810 chipset. Everything worked
flawlessly out of the box here.
Audio
Use the i810 audio module. This too worked pretty flawlessly, though
the default Debian install is stingy with permissions - I had to manually
chmod a+rw /dev/mixer /dev/dsp to get audio to work for non-root
users.
Power Management
This laptop uses ACPI instead of the older APM standard, and ACPI is only
partially supported under linux. I haven't gotten suspend to work yet, but
the battery and AC adapter detection are pretty flawless. Rebuild your kernel
with ACPI enabled and all should be happy - check /proc/acpi/ to see if
things are working.
by default, the gnome panel battery monitor applet looks at battery 1.
this needs to be changed to battery 0 in the properties panel and then
the battery will work fine.
Jog Dial
Recent kernels include support for the jog dial mounted with the trackpad.
Enable the sonypi module in the kernel. had to add device /dev/sonypi (major
10, minor 250) add those options to /etc/modules.conf then recompile
kernel with sonypi, ACPI, ieee1394 enabled. sjog works - but brightness
control is backwards and volume control doesn't work at all. (Volume control
was fixed by changing permissions on /dev/dsp and /dev/mixer to add write
access)
This took a little bit of work, but it's not too bad.
You need to compile and load a kernel with the ieee1394, ohci1394,
and sbp2 modules. (Plus SCSI support!) You should add these files
to /etc/modules so they are loaded automatically on system startup.
With those kernel modules installed and loaded, you should be all set
to go.
The docking station drive shows up as /dev/sr0 = /dev/scd0. The
default /dev/cdrom symlink is to /dev/hdc, so delete this and add a
symlink to /dev/scd0 instead.
I haven't tried DVD playing yet, but mounting CDs works fine.
I'm still working on getting this up and running. The word I hear
is that
"If you want to use the PCMCIA slot for wireless, you'll need to use
the drivers in the pcmcia-cs package, instead of those in the kernel.
This is because this laptop has a PCI-PCMCIA bridge, which isn't
supported by the kernel drivers at the time of this writing. pcmcia-cs
will also give you cardbus management tools (cardctl and cardmgr). (source)"
Useful Links:
Linux Sony Wiki
This page last modified 2003-01-29 by Marshall
Perrin