Linux on the Sony Vaio R600MX

Introduction

It weighs in at about 1.3Kg, has a 12.1" screen, a Celeron (Coppermine) 800, 128Mb of soldered memory (upgraded to 384Mb), an intel i815 Chipset, firewire, USB, Memory stick, Three hour battery life and the most comfortable keyboard I have ever worked on. Section One describes the specs. in more detail.

It arrived with Windows XP Home edition pre-installed on a single NTFS partition. I initially spent about three days trying to think of a way of booting into an installer without 'invasive surgery' before deciding to take the plunge. Section Two describes the 'Invasive Surgery' method of installation.

Section Two also describes how to access the laptop's RAM.

This is now the third major revision of the document, since I've moved through Redhat and Gentoo (by removing the drive), and now onto Debian (using pxeboot). IMHO, the main feature to look for in a distro is package management, and everything else pales in comparison to apt, but, I digress!

Sometime in late December 2003 I noticed the my logs were filling up with drive read errors. I decided that since I use SGI's XFS (which pays no attention to bad block lists - incidentally, ext does), and since IDEdrives (even laptop ones) are now fairly cheap, It would be easier to buy a new one, and start from scratch. I ended up with an Hitachi Travelstar 40GN 40Gb 4200rpm, which cost about 100 Pounds Sterling. I also decided that since I now have a DNS/DHCP server I would do things properly, and try out netbooting. This is the subject of Section Three.

Finally, Section Four gives some general information which may be useful to people installing any linux distro. I say 'any' because it is my firm belief that the majority of configuration will be in the kernel, and whilst a lot of people on the Linux Sony mailing list like to wax lyrical about SuSE, some people want to use something else.

Section One: Specifications

Celeron (coppermine) 800 without speedstep
128 MB SDRAM
Sony Vaio (Pheonix) ACPI BIOS with Sony PI controller
12.1" (1024X768) LCD Display - Does not seem to have any hardware backlight control.
Alps glidepoint trackpad, (+ Sony PI controlled scroll wheel).
Intel i810 (82815) Chipset with:
- i810/i815 VGA Controller (For accelerated X, you must use 16Bpp Colour)
- AD18881A Audio
- VGA connector ( bottom left)
- 10/100 MBit Ether Express Pro.
- RJ45 Connector (top right)
- Connextant software modem (HSF Modem)
- Modem cable Connector (top right)
2 x USB root hubs (controllers)
Sony memory stick drive (internal USB)
2 x External USB ports (top left, bottom right)
Texas Instruments IEE1394 (Firewire/iLink)
1 X External mini Firewire port ( bottom right)
Ricoh CardBus RL5c475

Section Two: Invasive Surgery

One of the easiest ways to install Linux is by taking the hard drive out and plugging it in to a different box, preferably one which has a bootable CD drive. The following diagram and pic should be sufficient to explain how it's done:

As mentioned, you will need an adapter to connect the drive to a desktop box. I salvaged mine from an old PC which had a laptop drive, and you can buy them on the net in loads of places now (e.g. Mini-itx).

When you plug it into a different box, make sure you connect it as Master on the First IDE chain (hda), this will save a lot of hassle if you want to use Lilo, or just use GRUB, which you can boot just about anything from using its shell.

To get to the memory, just undo the two screws closest to the battery (which you will have taken out). Then, gently lift the keyboard by the corner with the Escape key (I hear that fingernails work well :). I used a screwdriver.

This picture shows the white SODIMM slot, with the soldered memory underneath. If you buy memory from Orca Logic, they send you instructions, their customer service is also very good.

Once the drive is in another box, you should be able to boot off a CD (your other box does have a CD drive doesn't it?!). Your life will now start getting easier. Well, hopefully.

Section Three: Installing via Netboot

This section is debian specific, although I'm sure it could easily be extended to other distros (Gentoo being the obvious example).

First, visit the Debian website and find the docs.
Next, follow the instructions on how to set up a tftp server (and dhcp if you don't have one already).
You should also set up pxelinux, and remember to add the devfs=nomount option otherwise you could be in trouble.
Build a kernel with everything the vaio will need (including whichever filesystem types you want). It's best to build everything into your kernel, as that's all you'll use, unless you fancy making extra driver tarballs.
Copy your new kernel into the tftpboot directory on your server. Note: there's nothing to stop you trying a kernel like bf2.4, but I couldn't get it to boot on my machine.
Now, find yourself a suitable root disk image, or roll your own. I found one which included mkfs.xfs - perfect. This Debian installers page is handy.
Finally, configure your vaio to pxeboot (a bios options), and if everything worked you're away.

Section Four: General Information

Things which you'll need in the kernel include:

If you use a relatively recent kernel, 2.4.20 and upwards, 2.6.0 included, you shouldn't have any problems with ACPI. If, however, your kernel doesn't have acpi newer than from around Spetember 2003 the laptop probably won't boot.
For the memory stick you'll need need sd_mod, usb-storage and possibly vfat supprt, either built in or as modules.
sonypi, which you can include as a module or statically.

I have removed my kernel config (which I linked to in previous versions) becuse I change it and tweak it so often. I'm currently using 2.6.0, and so far everything has been perfect. Actually, it's still fine now, with 2.6.14.

With regard to sound: I had great problems using OSS, it never played at the right speed. To solve this, I use the ALSA modules, along with the OSS emulation layer modules. The module that the R600 needs is snd-intel8x0. If you can, you should use ALSA ( www.alsa-project.org), everything about it seems superior to other implimentations.

X is fairly straight forward to configure if you've ever done it before. If you have a USB mouse, I'd strongly urge you to use it... Don't forget the extra configuration in XF86Config-4. (Complete files on http://lx.student.wau.nl/~olivier/linux_on_r600hek/linux_on_r600hek.html). I've not included these files here because if you don't know how to make them, you'll learn a lot more by having to :).

To get the hot keys working (i.e. Fn + F1 etc), you'll need to use something like jdmouse, or my very own spikeyd, which allows you to assign the hot keys to just about anything.

Problems

Without recent (post Sept. 2002) ACPI, USB will not work. It took me ages to figure out what was going on before I read about this (try it on google if you're interested).

The screen doesn't scale, i.e. The console will not fill the entire screen. Getting a frame buffered kernel would allow this to be solved, but I've not tried it, since the VESA drivers don't work (the i810 is not a linear FB device). There is a project to provide drivers at i810fb.sf.net, and these drivers are now in 2.6. I've not tried them yet, however.

Maybe this isn't a problem, but the LCD backlight is only disabled when you shut the lid. Despite many people asking the mailing list again and again, it is not doable, and doesn't work in Windows. You can however use the excellent i810switch ( http://vorlon.cwru.edu/~ames/i810switch/) to enable and disable the image output on the CRT output and LCD.

Conclusions

A lack of external drives shouldn't stop you installing Linux on your R600. I'm really pleased with what I've managed to do with mine.

I gathered a lot of information before I did anything, the main sources were:

The linux-sony mailing list. (Find it through linux-on-laptops).
http://www.juljas.net/linux/vaiofx240/ Very useful information, especially on the 'usb problem'.
http://lx.student.wau.nl/~olivier/linux_on_r600hek/linux_on_r600hek.html Handy info on the R600 Series in general, including lspci outputs, X config files etc.
http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/ .

You might also find Tuxmobil's Sony page useful.

As always I welcome any feedback, please send it to: mattfoster at clara dot co dot uk, but please don't blame me if anything goes wrong. I simply cannot and will not be held responsible.