Fedora 8 on Sony Vaio SZ680

I'll report here my experience with using Fedora 8 on Sony SZ680.

What works out of the box (speed mode):

1. Sound (Internal speaker not muted after attaching a headphone)
2. Networking
3. Suspend (after installing NVIDIA driver)
4. Twinview (with external monitor)
5. USB/ Firewire
6. DVD+RW
7. Volume up / down keys
8. CPU frequency control
9. Fan control

The headphone problem can be solved by adding
"options snd-hda-intel model=vaio" to /etc/modprobe.conf.

The only outstanding problems are

1. webcam (works now, see below)
2. Brightness control (works for Intel card. See below)
Otherwise the laptop is ok.

Additionally, 64 bit Linus does indeed recognize 4GB ram (available around 3.9GB), though BIOS reports 3072 MB ram. so don't freak out.

I'll update this post when I solve the above two problems.

Update on 12/18/2007:
When using intel graphics backlight can be controled using xbacklight. This is a true backlight control unlike nvidia-settings brightness control, which can be used to dim the screen when using nvidia card.

Update on 1/25/2007:
Webcam works with the new driver available here:
http://wiki.mediati.org/R5u870

 

Thank you for sharing your experience

 

I dont understand what is meant by adding that line to /etc/modprobe.conf

How do I do this?

 

"modprobe.conf" is a Fedora specific file. If you're using Ubuntu you won't find it. Open the file /etc/modprobe.conf with nano. You'll see two lines like this:

options snd-card-0 index=0
options snd-hda-intel index=0

Change them to:

options snd-card-0 index=0 model=vaio
options snd-hda-intel index=0 model=vaio

And then reboot.

 

If you're using Ubuntu try opening /etc/modules and find those two lines mentioned above. Add model=vaio to them and the headphone jack sensing should work.

After little digging I found out the lines you are looking for is in:

/etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

Best of luck.

 

Is this a directory I need to navigate to? I am very new to Linux so I'm not sure.

 

I keep typing the various commands above as you mention but bash tells me the commands are not found.

 

/etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base is the complete path to the file...
in a terminal, you type sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

 

Thanks John B...rep added

 

Sony VAIO SZ640 here. There is a module called sony_laptop that can control brightness by writing values between 0-7 to files in /sys/class/backlight/sony/. My SZ640 did not contain the necessary methods for sony_laptop to work (more info at http://www.linux.it/~malattia/wiki/index.php/Sony_Vaio_Control_device_drivers).

To get the brightness to work, I installed the xbacklight application from xorg (xorg-app-xbacklight). I believe 1.1 is the current version ( http://xorg.freedesktop.org/releases/individual/app/) and I had to build it from source (required glibc-headers). Once xbacklight is installed, simply run "xbacklight -set VALUE" where VALUE is a number between 0-100.

Suspend does work using the STAMINA mode as well, however upon waking up, the monitor is dimmed very very low. Switch to a different virtual console (Alt+Ctl+F3 or F4, etc), then switch back to X (Alt+F7).

For more tips on saving power using Intel devices on linux, I would definitely check out LessWatts ( http://www.lesswatts.org/) and install the powertop utility (sudo yum install powertop, su -, powertop, then follow the recommended tips).

If you have any additional questions about the above, please dont hesitate to ask.

 

Thank you frostedegg.

 

Yes. Xbacklight does work. So the only thing that's bugging me now is the Webcam. I could not get it to work even with the patched driver available for Tz in ubuntu forum. If that thing works then Fedora 8 is a perfect distribution for this laptop.

 

Anyone been able to make compiz work on intel graphics?

 

With the backlight on mine, I ended up actually looking at ACPI events and adding an ACPI handling script, so that the actual button presses will change the brightness, rather than needing to run a program to change the brightness.

And boolda, I have heard that most people can get compiz working on Intel's graphics chips. It's generally the ATI cards that have issues.

 

Actually the Intel graphics card in SZ680 is backlisted in current compiz fusion. I can run compiz with NVIDIA card but in that case it has the terrible "blank" screen problem while the machine wakes up from suspend. Could you please post your ACPI handling script here.