Linux and Sony Vaio VGN-AR31S

Introduction

This is a record of my experiences with my Sony Vaio VGN-AR31S covering; initial installation, configuration, upgrades, and daily usage.

Being a Unix contractor working on various customer sites, I had a requirement for a desktop replacement, as apposed to just a laptop, to take with me wherever I went. It had to be robust and reliable enough to cope with a 8 hour a day, 5 days a week work load. My previous laptop, an Inspiron 8200, performed excellently over the years. However, it was getting old and warranties were becoming expensive and/or unavailable. So, time for a new machine !

Specification

CPU2.0 GHz Core 2 duo (T7200)
RAM2GB
DisksSATA: 120GB + 120GB (delivered striped => 240GB)
Video512Mb nVidia GeForce Go 7600 GT GPU
Display17" WUXGA
mediaBD DVD CD - RW DL

Initial checks

Assembling all the bits was as simple as ever. First impressions of the laptop straight out of the box: -

Having checked everything out and being very impressed with the laptop's performance.

Linux installation

Backup

Decided to dual boot for now. Sony do not supply Vista media as re-installing Vista is done by a recovery process which involves a dedicated partition. So the first step is to create a copy of the "recovery" partition to DVDs using the "Vaio Recovery Utility". N.b. that the utility will not allow you to use re-writaeable DVDs (only DVD±Rs).

Table of media speeds

Partitioning

First attempt to partition the volume was to use the new "shrink" facility for Vista partitions.

  1. defrag - nolonger has the visual representation nor any work in progress at all !
    Just a note "this may take a few minutes to hours" … So, when it eventually finishes …
  2. shrink partition - (navigate to "control panel", "system and maintenance", "administrative tools", and double-click "computer management") select "storage", and right-click on partition and select "shrink"

This shrank the C partition to 110Gb giving me 108GB for a linux partition. I wanted more like 60Gb for Vista and 150Gb for linux. Could not find a utility to do more defragging (the C partition had only 21GB used) even the command line 'defrag.exe -w' didn't do any more. Was I just unlucky with some unmovable blocks or does Vista prevent this ?

Second attempt was to partition using the recovery utility, mentioned above, and explicity partition the volume during the recovery process. Thus, run "Vaio Recovery Utility" and select the "C and D drive recovery (Change Partition Sizes)" option. Set the required partition size and let it go …

Linux

Downloaded SuSE (10.2) DVD iso and burnt to a DVD+R

Booting from DVD comes up with usual and, quickly skipping to partitioning section, check how it handles the RAID volume. This revealed, to my suprise, that it selected the D drive (created in the recovery process) from the RAID volume (it also detected, but correctly did not attempt to use the volume's underlying 2 disks).

However. When subsequently updating the kernel (from SuSE update RPMs) the rpm(?) failed to use the correct disk/partition entries and so, after a reboot, the machine fails to boot reporting (grub): "No such file". This is fixed by booting from the rescue DVD, mounting the /boot partition and re-editting the /boot/grub/menu.lst file (the correct disk/partition refs should still be available in the backup, /boot/grub/menu.lst.old, created by the rpm update.)

I have subsequently updated to the latest kernel (See Sound section below). So I now manually edit the menu.lst file in order to use the newest kernel.

Subsequent SuSE kernel updates do NOT break the menu.lst file … So, I do not know if this was a problem with the initial kernel RPM or of updating the kernel during the installation process.

Downloaded SuSE (10.3) DVD iso and installed (clean + restore of /home from backup). No issues this time with kernel updates.

Vaio hardware linux support

Linux installed. Now tuning and getting the hardware to work.

  1. SMP kernel - out of box.
  2. nVidia GeForce 7600 - download and install proprietory nVidia driver.

    Once using the 3D accelerated driver I installed Beryl an OpenGL 3D desktop. Since replaced with SuSE 10.3 XGL and updates to Xorg 7.3

  3. Sound - SuSE 10.2 nearly worked. I.e. the laptop speakers worked, but only two output channels were found and presented in the mixer. As a result of which there was no sound from headphones !

    The headphone/jack-in, input channels were missing from mixer (mkix, alsamixer, …). The only solution found was to download, compile and use latest stable kernel 2.6.21 (SuSE latest at the time was: 2.6.18.8) as the Vaio is still a very recent addition. This kernel has updated patches to handle the (Sony modified?) SigmaTel sound card.

    As expected there were no problems with SuSE 10.3 and kernel 2.6.22.12.

  4. TV card - detected (SAA7133/SAA7135 Video Broadcast Decoder), not yet tested.
  5. Wireless - detected (Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG), works seemlessly (using Knetworkmanager) out of the box.
  6. Suspend
    • To Disk - works fine
    • To RAM - not currently on s2ram's 'whitelist' this means I needed to determine which of s2ram's various suspend mechanisms worked …

      Package interaction: kpowersave uses suspend's s2ram. Determined that 's2ram -f -a 3' worked best. So added the following so that kpowersave would work: 

      S2RAM_OPTS="-f -a 3"

      To /etc/pm/config.d/config (N.b. prior to SuSE 10.3 this was /etc/pm/config)

      Or

      /usr/lib/pm-utils/defaults

      Only problem I have noticed after returning from a suspend is switching terminals doesn't work.

  7. Dock
  8. CD/DVD/BD - works with DVD+R ... need to test dual layer DVD writing ...
  9. Motion eye
  10. Buttons (Media centre: TV/optical disk) - Volume and mute work out of box.

VMWare

Linux installed and working. Now VMWare, and so to a "guest" OS: Solaris 10 (11/06). Used VMware Worksation 6 (beta). Works fine (niggle: drops to 32bit due the Phoenix BIOS being handicapped)

Contacted Sony support...and yes it is as bad as everyone says it is. It took several attempts to explain the problem of VT being disabled by the BIOS nothing to do with Vista nor Linux. Sadly, I gave up when asked for the nth time to re-install Vista before they would progress the call.

They are plenty of google hits (E.g.) for hacking the BIOS oneself. All involved using Windows Boot devices (CD, USB) with the necessary BIOS hacking software. These Boot devcies were all created in Windows and, by which time having only Linux on the Vaio, I found it just one step too far to be bothered with. :-(

Time to move on - July 2010

Bought a MacBook Pro, so decided to put Windows 7 on the old Vaio and give it to my sons to play with (should still be okay for SC2). But, oh dear...Sony have struck again !!!

Complete fresh install. Put the windows 7 DVD in DVD and install, when done it was in VGA mode and did not detect the nVidia card !! Tried to update all the drivers but all failed due to overzealousness on Sony's part. I decided (bad mistake) to use the Upgrade in-place method, instead of persevering with updating the drivers manually.

So, re-installed the old Vista from recovery CDs…then, and this is the very bad part, let Sony Update, update all the drivers and software. Bad, because one of the updates was to the firmware of the BD DVD …. Eventually, after a few hiccups that meant I had to start over from recovery (and losing any rollback of firmware IF it existed) from scratch Vista was up and running. So, upgrade in-place from the Windows 7 DVD. However, the Vaio would no longer 'recognise' the Windows 7 DVD. Not in the OS nor from BIOS (as it did previously). Hence the problem must be the BD DVD firmware (as the BIOS was not updated). I have looked and failed to find original firmware on Sony's site. So, the Vaio is stuck with Vista.

Options:

  1. Stick with Vista - afterall I'm not using it ;-) …
  2. Carry on searching for old firmware and THEN persuade the flash utility to flash an older version
  3. Sell it and buy a cheap replacement
  4. Search eBay for parts, hoping to get an old replacement DVD drive for the Vaio WITH the old firmare on it

Dean Darlison
Last modified: Fri Jul 23 08:08:05 BST 2010