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Well it's Christmas time and my lovely wife got me a Sony Vaio Z (2012) as a present as she knew I had been lusting after one for awhile. I've had it for a few days now and I thought it would be fun to write up a detailed review of it and the process of getting Linux on it as that is what I use 95% of the time. The Vaio Z my wife purchased for me has the 3632QM i7, 8GB memory, 256 GB SSD, 1080p display, Blu-ray burner Portable Media Dock (PMD) and the premium carbon fiber finish.
Some background about me to put this review in context, I'm a software consultant that was using a 15.6” Clevo 151em based laptop prior to this one. The Clevo is a pretty powerful beast but also looks like one with the weight to match. As a consultant I basically have to lug all my equipment in and out of the client's office each day and I was looking for something lighter and smaller but still had the equivalent power of the Clevo. Only the Sony Vaio Z met all that criteria. Additionally I wanted the ability to do some gaming and the concept of the PMD with the detached discrete graphics card is a perfect match for me as I don't need the graphics capability at work and moving it to the PMD keeps the laptop size and weight down.
First let's look at the physical aspects of the laptop. For such a small laptop it comes with a pretty decent selection of ports out of the box including two USB 3.0 ports, HDMI and a VGA port. I would have preferred displayport over the VGA port in order to support hi-res monitors but it is not a deal breaker for me. However if you have a high-res monitor (greater then 1920 x 1080) keep in mind that you might have trouble driving the full resolution from this laptop. The one USB port doubles as a connector for the PMD which uses Sony's proprietary Light Peak connector and is in turn an early version of Intel's Thunderbolt technology. I would have preferred a standard copper based Thunderbolt connector as this would have provided more future proofing.
While I've seen many reviews complaining about the keyboard and trackpad I find them quite comfortable myself. The keys do have pretty short travel due to the thinness of the laptop but I still find them to comfortable to type on. The trackpad is a bit on the small side when compared to Macs but is quite functional and supports multi-finger gestures. I miss having dedicated home, end, page up and page down keys on the keyboard though as I use those a lot when editing, Sony should have made the Prt Sc and Pause keys Home and End and re-mapped those other keys to the function keys. I'll probably change things to this mapping in Linux when I get a chance.
The maximum memory of 8GB is a bit disappointing as my previous laptop had 16GB of memory and this can be quite useful when juggling multiple VMs at the same time. I had to do a bit of soul searching to make sure I would be fine with 8GB and really work out exactly how much space I needed for my work. Since my previous laptop had so much memory I never paid much attention to how much RAM I was using, fortunately it looks like 8GB should be enough but if Sony had a 12GB or 16GB option I would have gone for it.
The premium carbon finish on the laptop is gorgeous IMHO and helps give the laptop a much more upscale feel then the default black finish with silver band I was eyeing at the store. At this price point though the premium finish should be standard rather then an extra cost item. One downside to the premium finish is that it is a complete fingerprint magnet, be sure to keep a micro fiber clothe handy to wipe it down periodically. The interior is made of a matte material which has a good feel but I do find the natural oils from one's skin really stick to it, the keyboard and trackpad and I find I have to wipe it down once a day to keep it looking nice. Maybe I just need to wash my hands more often
The 1080p display is very good quality for a TN panel when looking at it head own in my normal working position. Typical of TN panels though viewing angles are not very good though and again at this price point Sony should really be using an IPS panel. One minor complaint is that I do have a bit of light bleed at the bottom which is quite noticeable when displaying a mostly dark screen. It's not a major issue for me but for some folks who are sticklers it can be an issue. I'm not sure if the screen is a matte screen or a glossy screen, it has some of the sheen of a glossy screen but it's not as a reflective as an out and out glossy screen would be.
One concern I had with the 1080p screen is whether or not it is too much resolution for such a small screen in the sense that text would be too small to read comfortably. I'm happy to report that for working with documents or code I don't have any issues at all either in Gnome or Windows, in fact I don't use any text scaling factor at all (100% Smallest in Windows, 1.0 text scaling factor in Gnome). Like a retina display the screen is so sharp and crisp that even at small sizes it is perfectly comfortable reading it. Not having to use scaling is important to me since as a software developer higher effective resolution directly translates into higher productivity. I do find some web sites a little small though fortunately this is easy to deal with simply by hitting “Ctrl +” and “Ctrl -” to zoom in and out.
The PMD has a discrete graphics card from ATI plus some additional ports (HDMI, VGA, 2 USB and ethernet). Like the laptop, I wish the VGA was a displayport instead in order to better support high resolution monitors. The graphics card in the PMD is an ATI 7670M card which is really just a re-branded 6650 card that was used in the Z2. While it provides more graphical ooph then the Intel HD4000 it is disappointing that Sony didn't go with a more up to date chip. The convenience of the PMD docking station is great though, it's nice to get home and only have to plug in the PMD connector and the 1/4” plug to my external speakers.
Speaking of speakers, like all other reviews have noted the quality of the on-board speakers is pretty bad. This doesn't bother me one iota though as I never, ever use the laptop speakers. At work the speakers are muted and at home I use external speakers. Anywhere else I use ear buds or a portable speaker system that shows up as a secondary sound card.
I discovered that it is really fortunate for me that I don't use the speakers though because my laptop has the white noise issue noted elsewhere where white noise is constantly emanating from the speakers at a low volume. In Windows the drivers automatically mute the speakers when not in use so it's not that noticeable. However in Linux the drivers do not mute the speakers automatically and the noise is constant and irritating unless you manually mute the speakers yourself. As I mentioned previously this isn't an issue for me, however others should keep this issue in mind if using the on-board speakers in Linux is a priority for you as it could be a deal breaker.
Once I got the laptop I immediately created the recovery disc and proceeded with installing Ubuntu 12.10 Gnome Remix on it. My original intention was to completely replace Windows on this laptop, to play games I was counting on using the new native Steam client or using VGA pass-through in a virtual machine like Xen or VirtualBox. I disabled the fakeRAID array in the BIOS and proceeded with an install using the Linux software based RAID capabilities provided by mdadm.
The installation turned out to be a bit tricky because Ubuntu dropped proper RAID and LVM support in the installer as they no longer produce the alternate disc that supported it. The recommended approach is to install 12.04 which has the support for RAID and LVM but then upgrade to 12.10. I wasn't keen on that because I prefer a clean install and also because I'm using Gnome Remix instead of default Ubuntu I'd have to do some package removing and cleaning post-installation to get to the same spot.
Instead what I did was to boot to the live CD and install mdadm which allowed me to manually create the software based arrays I need for the “/” and “/home” mount points. The swap partition doesn't need to be RAIDed since Linux can unify two separate swap partitions on it's own. Once the install is done the key is to make this work is to chroot to the new install and then “sudo apt-get install mdadm” so when it boots it can read the new array as mdadm is not installed by default.
Everything major on the laptop itself (wifi, brightness and volume controls, backlit keyboard) seems to work out of the box with Ubuntu 12.10. The trackpad is a bit jittery but after applying some changes in configuration noted in the Ubuntu on SVZ13 thread on this forum it works fine.
The major function issue of concern for most people though would be the PMD. After some research it seems to use the PMD in Linux requires some patches in the 3.5 kernel and re-compiling it, however rather then install the patches I just ended up installing the 3.6.9 kernel (as per instructions here Upgrade Ubuntu 12.10 or 12.04 to Linux Kernel 3.6.9 | ITworld) instead as someone on the Linux Vaio Z mailing list had mentioned they had good luck with that and it was much simpler since the patches for the PMD were applied in the 3.6 kernel line. The only other thing I had to do to get the PMD graphics going was to create an xorg.conf file as per the directions in this post [ubuntu] Howto Sony Vaio VPC-Z2 on Precise - Ubuntu Forums. After this the PMD was able to drive two monitors (one HDMI, one VGA) without issue though I found the VGA monitor a bit fuzzy, not sure if it was by cable or an inherent issue with VGA.
One problem that I did have with the PMD though is that when you booted without the PMD attached Ubuntu would hang due to the xorg.conf file trying to load the Radeon driver. I ended up having to create a bash script that checked for the Radeon device using lspci and either adding or removing the xorg.conf file accordingly. The bash script was executed in /etc/init and setup up to execute before GDM is loaded which in turn loads X. I'm going to post a how-to in the next few days and will cover this in more detail.
While the discrete graphic card in the PMD works fine under Linux, there are some limitations people should be aware of when looking at this machine as a primarily Linux machine:
a. When using the ATI card the internal laptop screen runs a text console by default, you can't span the Gnome 3 session to it since Linux has really poor support for running multiple video cards simultaneously. It should be possible to create a separate X session on the internal screen using a different DE (KDE, fluxbox, etc) but I haven't attempted it. Xinemara also isn't an option as it doesn't support compositing. Hopefully xrandr 1.4 will provide better support for multiple GPUs once it comes out.
b. As far as I can tell the PMD only works with the open source Radeon driver rather then the proprietary Catalyst (fglrx) driver. While the open source driver is better and more stable in many ways, it's gaming performance is poor compared to the proprietary driver. I tried Legend of Grimrock with the open source driver and at 1920x1200 it could only handle low graphic settings, at high it was a complete slideshow. When I ran the same game in Windows 8 on the PMD using the Leshcat drivers, it ran at high settings with no issue.
As I mentioned earlier, I'm a moderate gamer so the performance of the open source driver was disappointing. I thought I would try VGA pass-through as an option which is where a VGA card is dedicated to a VM allowing the software running in the VM to use it directly and not incur a performance penalty. VGA pass-through requires a discrete PCI graphics card that is not being used by the host machine. It would appear that the Sony Vaio Z is the perfect machine for this as the ATI card appears as just another PCI device and it would be trivial to run Gnome off of the Intel GPU and dedicate the ATI card to the VM. Unfortunately as I found it this is just not technically feasible.
VGA-passthrough requires support for an Intel virtualization technology called VT-D. Unfortunately while the CPU (3632QM) supports it and the BIOS (with a hack) would support it, the HM77 chipset Sony uses in the laptop does not. Thus VGA pass-through is not an option which is a real disappointment considering how perfect this hardware setup would be for it. I wish I would have realized this earlier, I would have still bought the laptop but probably would have opted for dual boot right off the bat.
In short if you are a Linux only user and looking to game in Linux on a laptop this isn't the laptop for you, stick with a more conventional laptop and in particular laptops with a Nvidia GPU.
So since gaming on Linux wasn't really an effective option with this laptop, I decided to blow away my installation and dual boot with Windows 8. Installing Windows 8 was simple enough however I did make the mistake of letting it install it's 350 MB system partition. In retrospect it would have been better to create all the partitions in GParted and then installed everything accordingly.
I first tried setting up dual boot using the BIOS based fakeRAID and installed Windows 8 with no issues. However I could not get Ubuntu 12.10 to install at all, neither dmraid or mdadm on the live CD would work. The dmraid recognized the fakeraid but I couldn't get the partitions created in Gparted though again in retrospect I should have tried doing it manually using fdisk to see if that worked. The mdadm also sort of recognized the fakeRAID but again getting partitions created was problematic.
Since the fakeRAID wasn't working, I just broke the RAID again and installed Windows 8 in a 45 GB partition on the first drive. For Linux I typically install with three partitions: root “/”, home and swap. However since the root only takes a 25 GB partition or so I wanted “/home” to span the remainder of the first SSD and the entirety of the second SSD (except for the swap partition). To do this I ended up using LVM to create a logical spanned volume and once again had to do it all manually in the live CD since the Ubuntu 12.10 support for LVM is next to useless. The nice thing with LVM is that it supports TRIM pass-through from ext4 so it doesn't degrade the life of the SSDs in the laptop.
For Windows 8 I just installed the Sony Firmware Parser, Sony Shared Library, Vaio Control Center, battery checker and the Leshcat 12.10 WHQL drivers. In my very brief play with it, Windows 8 seems to run awesome on this laptop and considering how simple it is to get going sometimes it makes me wonder why I bother with Linux at all. Having said that, once I start actually using Windows again it always reminds me why I prefer Linux
When Ubuntu 13.04 comes out, hopefully with better support for FakeRAID, I'll probably install everything all over again using the FakeRAID but my current install will cover me for the four or so months until then.
At the end of the day this is a great laptop and I have no regrets about getting it. It is disappointing to me that the support for the PMD in Linux isn't as great as it could be but I'm confident that this will improve over the next 6 to 12 months. Despite that there is no other laptop that has such a combination of power and portability, if like me you need to full on mobile CPU and not an ULV CPU like those found in Ultrabooks this is the laptop for you. With the rise of Thunderbolt, I also predict that this design of an ultra portable laptop combined with an external GPU docking station will become more prevalent in the future.
Sony Vaio Z (2012) Review from Linux Perspective
Discussion in 'VAIO / Sony' started by GeraldNunn, Dec 30, 2012.
