| Specs: |
| Processor : Intel PIII 800 |
| RAM : 128 Megs |
| Hard Drive : 15 Gig |
| network : etherExpress Pro 100 |
| sound : i810 |
| video : intel 815EM |
| I-Link : Texas Instruments OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 |
| DVD : matshita UJDA710 |
| PCMCIA : Ricoh R15C476 Cardbus |
| Modem : Conexant-Ambit Softk56 |
| Resources | |
| www.kernel.org | Get the latest Linux Kernel |
| www.xfree86.org | Get the latest Xserver |
| www.linux-usb.org | Get the skinnee on usb for linux |
| linux1394.sourceforge.net | fire wire for linux |
| www.linux-laptop.net | other pages like this one |
| xine.sourceforge.net | a cool DVD player for Linux |
| www.linuxdoc.org | documentaion on almost everything |
| www.linuxnewbie.org | a good source of information and help |
| http://www.pm.waw.pl/~jslupski/vaio/ | patch to get usb working |
Step 1: Install
Before doing the install I recomend going into the bios and turning of plug and play OS. You can do this by hiting F2 at the Sony logo screen.
I used a set of Debian Potato CD's that I had and booted from the cdrom drive. The 15 gig drive was already partioned into one
5 gig that had windows installed and one 10 gig. Using fdisk I formated the 10 gig partion and partioned out the swap /boot and
/root. After that I just followed the regular Debian install procedure except for two things. When it asks you if you want to
remove the pcmcia modules select yes (having them will crash the machine on boot). When it comes time to install kernel modules,
for the network card select eepro100.
Step 2: Upgrade
I like to run Debian Unstable, that way I get all the newest packages and updates. That is why the first thing I did after the install
was connect to the internet and upgrade everything. I did this by changing the /etc/apt/sources.list entries to point to the unstable
branch. After that I ran apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade and apt-get upgrade to make sure I had all the latest packages. I
then got the newest XFree86 (4.1.0) and downloaded the latest kernel (2.4.9) from www.xfree86.org
and www.kernel.org respectively.
Step 3: XFree86
I then installed the Xfree86 by running Xinstall.sh. To get the touchpad on the laptop working tell XFree86 that you have a PS/2
mouse on /dev/psaux. I then selected the regular US keyboard. I then choose the "intel 810" card out of the card database i think
it was #262 (I know the chipset is really the intel 815EM but this seems to work fine). The PCG-FX240 has a 14.1 inch screen with a
Vsync of 60hz and a Hsync of 31.5 - 80 and a resolution of 1024x768, input those values accordingly as the install prompts you to.
I then selected the 1024x768 at 16bpp as my default resolution.
Step 4: Kernel
Next I configured the kernel that I downloaded earlier. After I unpacked it I ran make xconfig. From there I was able to configure
all the modules that I want installed. Some of these were i810_audio, eepro100, ide-scsi (scsi emulation), usb hid, input core, and
a few others. After I had selected everything I wanted ran make dep, make modules, make modules_install, make bzImage copied the
bzImage into /boot, added it to lilo and it boots fine.
Step 6: CDR/W In order to get the CDR/W working I enabled scsi emulation in the kernel (ide-scsi) along with general scsi and scsi cdrom support. I compiled all those into the kernel, not as modules. Next I had to edit the /etc/lilo.conf file to tell the kernel to use ide-scsi instead of the normal driver for the cdrom. The at the end of the entry for the kernel that I was booting I added this line append="hdc=ide-scsi". After I ran lilo and rebooted, a cdrecord -scanbus told me that I had a scsi cdr on 0,0,0.
Step 7: DVD In order to play DVD's I wanted to use the XINE DVD player. I downloaded the latest version, installed all the dependencies (zlib, libpng2, libpng2-dev, aalib1) and compiled the xine-lib. Before compiling the xine-ui I had to add something to the path export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib did the trick and then the xine-ui compiled fine. Because the cdrom was taken over by the scsi driver /dev/cdrom and /dev/dvd were disabled and /dev/scd0 is the only device pointed to the drive. So I did a ln -s /dev/scd0 /dev/cdrom and ln -s /dev/scd0 /dev/dvd so everything could be accessed as normal.
Step 8: Things to do By now the laptop is booting the latest kernel and using a fully functioning Xserver. However there a few things that aren't yet functional. I have not yet tried to mess with the pcmci or the IEEE 1394 since I don't have an peripherals that would use them yet.
