I have had a lot of laptops to play with, but this afternoon I bought one for me. I will write here my experience with it, especially setting up Linux on it.
I have a bi-celeron 500 at home, with a 19" screen. Obviously I did not need another fast and powerful computer. What I wanted was a small and light sub-notebook. I needed good autonomy (supposed to be 3,5 hours on this one) and good screen (800x600 is just too small). I wanted to use almost Linux only on it (I do not even have a Win partition on my home box) but knew I would have to keep Windows (I will have Delphi homeworks next year)
Hopefully the SR1K had a lot of the things I needed and even more :
I just discovered that it does not have an IR port, which is sad since my cell phone has one. It has a memory card slot and the jog control from sony, but i don't think they'll be very useful. You should also note that it comes without any floppy drive. You have to buy an USB floppy. It is sold with a PCMCIA CDROM, and it can boot from it.
Nothing special. Little box, little computer : all you asked for.
The windows side of the Laptop
I had no time nor lust for trying to get refunded for the Win2k that comes with the subnotebook. I heard that Win2k was really more stable than Win9x and I decided to keep it.
It ends Win install, and you find yourself sitting in front of a 10" screen, showing a 1024x768 desktop, wondering why your 14" never showed such a nice desktop. The screen is just great ! The touchpad is one of those things that need time to get used to. The keyboard is not a big one ... after one hour or so, of typing, it begins to feel nicer. I am not sure however, if using it will ever be as easy as using a desktop keyboard. Sound is not great, but better than on a Thinkpad 570 as far as I can tell. I tried using an headphones, but the sound was not very loud (I will have to try in a train or a plane), and I heard strange noises ... do not buy this thing as an mp3 player.
Sony jog control seems nice ... the first 2 minutes, the idea was good, but it takes too much space on screen and memory in system. I uninstalled almost all sony products.
Enough with windows, let's try to get the thing run Linux !
Not much information found on Internet. Except on Sony web site ; altavista and dejanews do not return much on SR1K.
This is what i found in Win2k Control Panel :
The Vaio comes with a 6.2Gb partition and another one of 2.3Gb (approximately). Although it comes with Win2k preloaded, partition are FAT32.
I deleted the second one and wanted to reduce the first one : There is no more 'Boot under MSDOS' option in Win2k, i had to copy FIPS on C: and reboot with a Win98 CD-ROM in disk, and then reduce C: under DOS.
I downloaded a Debian Potato (Test 3) iso file from ftp.debian.org and burnt it to a CDR. I plugged in my PCMCIA CDROM (sold with the laptop) and booted from it.
I had no probleme booting off the CDROM, but during the installation it was not available before you load PCMCIA support. Since I expected the CDROM would not be available during the installation, I had copied all debian/ to windows partition.
A few minutes later, I was rebooting and apt started installing packages from the CDROM.
Debian does not configure LILO for multi-boot system. A classic lilo.conf works just fine, andI can boot either Linux either Win 2000. I heard that some people had problems with lilo and Vaios but I did not encounter any.
PCMCIA Cdrom and networking card worked without any further key stroke (just an ifconfig and then setting up dhcp).
X11 worked quickly, find my XF86Config file here. I had a little problem at 16bpp, it seems unable to switch to virtual consoles, but it works just fine at 24bpp.
I was planning on buying an USB keybord and mouse, since USB support is only available in new 2.4 kernels, I downloaded linux-2.4.0-test4 and built it with APM and ACPI support. So far, it's pretty stable, and I was quite surprised to see that the little thing boots really quickly.
I have had no time to try USB yet. I still need to buy some USB devices. I got used to the keyboard pretty fast and I don't want to buy an USB keyboard anymore.
The Jogdial is pretty useless under Linux. If you know how to use it, please tell me.
Memory card is supposed to be hdd or hde but I did not try.
And of course ...
Getting sound to work took me some time ... :
I had read that sound support was included in the NM256 graphic chipset, so that's where I looked first. I installed OSS NM256 driver, but it would not load : "No such device".
I had posted on comp.os.linux.portable a message asking for help with my Vaio, and Ray answered my post, this is what he told me :
I don't know the reason but on a lot of Vaios the sound of NM256 is not used! In stead there is a Yahama YMF744 on my laptop, but it seems not always the case. I had to install the latest Alsa drivers and turn of 'plug and play OS'in the BIOS. The install procedure complained about a lib file it couldn't find, but I know Suse has this strange thing about places and names of files so I had that one solved in no time. I have chosen a kernel with APM support. This has an option to stop the sound driver before going in suspend. Nice option because otherwise you have to restart sound every resume from suspend. From then on it worked fine.
I did as he said, but without turning Off PnP support in BIOS : did not work. I then turned it off, rebooted and after having turned on the sound with alsamixer I was able to play mp3s.
APM worked out of the box, I can read battery status using /proc/apm or with any APM applet out there. At startup it prints : "ACPI enabled but APM already loaded", or something like that. I guess I should turn off APM and just keep ACPI.
Suspend worked fine before I had sound loaded. I was even able to suspend the box when it was downloading a file via an ethernet PCMCIA card, and it just kept going when I woke it up. With sound loaded, it doesn't want to suspend anymore ... had no time to really figure out how to get all this working correctly.
Battery seems able to last at least 1.5 hour, probably even 2 when you are just typing under Xwindows, as I am doing right now. I set the hard drive to spin down after 50 seconds using hdparm -S 10 /dev/hda, looking at the battery gauge, it seems pretty efficient. According to what I have seen on other laptops, if you stay in text mode, you will use much less battery. I also heard that sound would dramatically reduce autonomy but have not tried yet.
In only two days, I already had some good fun with this little laptop. Video chipset is not as fast as my G400 and I had to change from Opaque move method to Box, but having 1024x768 in such a small laptop is just great. I don't feel like the screen is too small, 10" is far different from 19" but it really feels comfortable.
Keyboard and glide pad works pretty well too, but get ready to learn some keyboard shortcuts. I forgot to say that the really useful tap function works well too and I almost do not use the left button (in fact it's way too hard to push it while tapping the glide pad feels really great).
Except for the winmodem, everything works well and this laptop is small enough to be carried everywhere with you. Screen resolution is enough to do some real work but I would still not advice you to buy this for everyday work.
I hope that support for this winmodem will come before I learn to do Fourrier transformation and have to do it myself :) If you have any information on the winmodem, or the jogdial, please tell me.
I still have to understand how to get the Fn+<key> combo to work. I am not yet able to set screen contrast.
Last modified: Sun Jul 16 01:33:14 CEST 2000