Debian/GNU Linux on the Sony VAIO GR100K

I got a (used) GR100K as my "on-the-road" machine. With 866MHz it might be faster than the 600MHz slimtop I have in my office. Of course I had to install Debian on it. Since I sometimes have to use Windows software, I decided to install Debian on the second (D) partition, which had already been emptied by the previous user.

Installation

The Debian 3.0 (woody) CD booted without problems from the internal DVD drive. I chose bf2.4, since I did not want to use a 2.2 kernel anymore. The installation of the base system went without major problems. I split the ex-D partition into a 500MB swap partition, the rest is for one ext3 Linux partition.

Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 2432 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *         1      1020   8193118+   7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2   *      1021      2370  10843875   83  Linux
/dev/hda3          2371      2432    498015   82  Linux swap

The bad news, not everything works right out of the box:

the kernel needs some patching for proper ACPI support
XFree86 (4.1.0) works, but only with the vesa driver
audio is choppy
DVD playback is not working properly
no support for my Visor USB dockingstation
no(?) firewire support
no Jogdial
no memorystick support

The good news, all of this and more can be fixed.

Kernel

Most of the fixes can be achieved with a new kernel. The excellent linux-sony mailing list and webpage has all the information. You can get most things on a Vaio computer to work, if you compile a 2.4.18 kernel with the Megapatch, ie ACPI, Jogdial, Memorystick, maybe more. However, I want to run 2.4.20. Unfortunately there is no megapatch for this kernel version. But it seems I got everything working just with the original 2.4.20 kernel and the ACPI patches for this(!) kernel version. I also applied the software suspend patches, but could not make it work yet. I hope the memorystick still works without the memorystick patch, the device is detected, but I have no memory stick available to test this again.

Audio: activate "Persistent DMA buffers" to get proper audio (note I also built the ALSA driver, but did not get them to work yet, OSS works fine, though)
```
CONFIG_SOUND=m
CONFIG_SOUND_ICH=m
CONFIG_SOUND_OSS=m
CONFIG_SOUND_DMAP=y
```

Video: not sure if I need all these, only agpart is loaded

CONFIG_AGP=m
CONFIG_AGP_INTEL=y
CONFIG_AGP_I810=y
CONFIG_DRM_RADEON=m
CONFIG_DRM_I810=m
CONFIG_FB_RADEON=m

Sony Jogdial: install sjog
```
CONFIG_SONYPI=m
```

Firewire

CONFIG_IEEE1394=m
CONFIG_IEEE1394_OHCI1394=m
CONFIG_IEEE1394_VIDEO1394=m
CONFIG_IEEE1394_SBP2=m
CONFIG_IEEE1394_ETH1394=m
CONFIG_IEEE1394_DV1394=m
CONFIG_IEEE1394_RAWIO=m

USB

CONFIG_USB=y
CONFIG_USB_UHCI=m
CONFIG_USB_UHCI_ALT=m

The memory stick needs:

CONFIG_USB_STORAGE=m

The Visor USB connector needs:

CONFIG_USB_SERIAL=m
CONFIG_USB_SERIAL_VISOR=m

EEPRO Ethernet: linux-2.4.20 comes with Intels e100 driver, which I find more reliable than the original eepro100 driver. At least in 2.4.20, eepro100 would loose conenction from time to time, removing and reloading the module helped, for some time. This never happend with e100, so
```
CONFIG_E100=m
```
and load this module instead of eepro100.
PCMCIA WLAN: Disable PCMCIA in the kernel, instead unpack pcmcia-cs and linux-wlan-ng in /usr/modules. Be sure to unpack these packages anew everytime you compile for a different kernel version. make-kpkg somehow stores the kernel-version in the modules directory and I could only build proper modules packages when I unpacked those packages from scratch. But since no patches and no configuration is needed, this is only a little annoyance. The wlan driver needs a little configuration. My greatest hurdle was the encryption, which I had previously turned on in the base station. This could not be turned off with the ap-tools from within linux, nor could I make the PCMCIA card use the WEP key. Turning encryption off in the base station and the PCMCIA card, and the WLAN comes up when you plug in the card.

Kernels are build with make-kpkg (kernel-package):

cd /usr/src/linux-2.4.20 ; make-kpkg kernel_image modules_image

With this kernel, most of the hardware is working, especially ACPI, which controls the fan, lets you check the CPU temperature and lets you powerdown the machine. Software suspend and the (win)modem are probably not working yet.

DVD playback

I tried mplayer, ogle and xine for DVD playback. Each of them had different problems, especially with my first kernels. Enabling DMA audio made audio and video run synchronous. The other problems where fixed by installing the woody backport of XFree86 4.2. The radeon driver of this version supports the Radeon Mobility M6 Y chip in the vaio, so I could use the radeon driver instead of the vesa driver in XFree. mplayer then works in xfree, ogle shows correct colours and allows fullscreen display. Make sure /dev/dvd points to the DVD drive. It is /dev/hdc without ide-scsi, and (normally) /dev/scd0 with ide-scsi. If you use firewire CD-Rom drives, be sure to load ide-scsi before sbp2, otherwise the numbering will change. If you use devfs, things will probably be different again. AFAIK you need to use ide-scsi if you want to use the internal DVD drive as a CD reader device (at least) in xcdroast.

Firewire

I tested a Yamaha CDRW and my Panasonic MiniDV camera. I use a shell script when I power-on the external CDRW drive:

modprobe ieee1394
modprobe ohci1394
modprobe sbp2
rescan-scsi-bus

Where rescan-scsi-bus is one of the nicer rescan-scsi scripts, which also is very useful if you have regular SCSI devices which are not powered on all the time. gscanbus detects both devices fine. The external CDRW works fine with xcdroast. I could read in video from the MiniDV camera with dvgrab and kino (after I built 0.6.4).

Not working

Software suspend: did not try hard enough yet, the swsusp patches are in the kernel, but the suspend script does not work yet.
TV out no go, atitvout does not work (yet?) with the Radeon M6
Winmodem not tried, I use DSL through the WLAN card and my Linux router
Back button next to the jog dial: this might be useful as an extra mouse button

Links

The complete kernel config file
The XFree86 config file

Entries for sources.list for updated woody packages XFree86 4.2:

deb http://people.debian.org/~blade/woody/i386/ ./
deb http://people.debian.org/~cts/ dists/woody/main/binary-$(ARCH)/

sjog, kino

deb http://people.debian.org/~cts/ dists/woody/main/binary-all/    
deb-src http://people.debian.org/~cts/ woody main

rescan-scsi-bus script
linux-sony mailing-list and website
Other Linux on Vaio pages

Christian T. Steigies

Sending spam email to this address will be prosecuted. Last modified: Sun Mar 16 02:30:50 EST 2003