Linux on the Sony Vaio PCG-GRV516G

Warning! This page is an archived page and has not been updated for several years. All of the information is likely out of date.

Introduction

I bought a second hand laptop in 2002, just after I'd started university, but two weeks later it got stolen from outside a chemistry lab that I was working in :-( I had good insurance though, and a fortnight later I got a new Sony Vaio delivered. Because the old laptop had a 15.7 inch TFT screen I got a 16 inch screen, and because the only 16 inch models were high-end I got a laptop worth £1500, wow! I also specifically asked the insurance company to check whether the laptop was Linux-compatible, which I suspected it would be. They telephoned Sony who said that it would run Linux, but you'd have to install it yourself. I was happy :-)

Specification

Installing

I installed Gentoo from their latest LiveCD using the 'acpi' boot option, as I had read of poor performance and non-operational USB if ACPI was disabled. The kernel booted fine, and the LiveCD found my network card and loaded the module for it. I configured the network manually and then continued on with the install. I then deleted all the existing partitions on the harddrive (I believe there was a 'C' drive and a 'D' drive under Windows, roughly 15GB each) and repartitioned for Linux. I didn't use a swap partition because I knew that I was going to upgrade the RAM in the machine to 512MB soon, and sure enough I've never used all my RAM and needed to go into swap. I then followed the Gentoo installation instructions and configured my kernel at the end of the process.. For sound support in 2.4 you can either build the OSS driver into the kernel or use the ALSA modules. I just used ALSA and it worked fine.

An important option to enable with a Sony laptop is the "Sony Vaio Programmable I/O Control Device Support" option under "Character Devices". It enables you to change the brightness of the LCD with a program called spicctrl as well as monitor the battery without ACPI support. A plugin for GKRellm is also available called gkrellm-vaiobright to control the LCD brightness from within GKRellm. I used ALSA support for the onboard intel8x0 soundcard, which works great, although under 2.6.0-test9 (ALSA 0.9.7) I get strange pitch bends at predictable points while playing an mp3 in XMMS. This weird problem is fixed in the latest ALSA that is included in Andrew Morton's -mm patchset. For the onboard network card I used the Intel e100 driver and it seems to work very well.

The onboard Radeon Mobility 7500 is well supported by the DRI Project and so compiling kernel support for this card in is recommended (if you want to use the 3D-accelerated portion of the card). If using Gentoo, you can simply "emerge xfree-drm" for a recent DRM tarball to be installed, which contains more recent drivers than the 2.4 kernels. The only optional hardware that I have installed is a Cisco Aironet 352 802.11b card and a Creative Webcam Pro, so those options can be safely left out if you don't need them. I then installed GRUB as my bootloader to the MBR of the harddrive and rebooted to proceed to the next stage of installation

After rebooting with the new kernel installed I continued the installation by installing the base system and waited a few hours for it to compile and install. The laptop did get pretty hot at this point, I registered ACPI thermal zone temperatures of upto 80°C! I suppose it might be an idea to actually stop the install after each compile, but the laptop is still running well a year later! Once I'd installed the base system I then installed X, Mozilla and all the other applications that I could think of at the time, and left the laptop compiling for another day ;-) It did get very toasty at this point!

Configuration

To configure XFree86 I just used xf86config to generate an /etc/X11/XF86Config file and then tweaked it slightly for DRI module loading and the "refresh rates" of the flat panel. The configuration for the Synaptics touchpad is also in the XF86Config file, and sets up scrolling on the pad for the right side of the pad. The userspace driver can be found here although it is included in the Gentoo ebuild for XFree86 4.3.0. The 2.6 kernel has a Synaptics driver included which seems to work well.As I have an extra USB mouse in addition to the builtin touchpad, I've configured X with the USB mouse as the "CorePointer" and the touchpad to "SendCoreEvents". This is because in order for the scrollwheel and extra buttons to work on the USB mouse they have to be remapped. xmodmap only remaps the events from the CorePointer, hence I set the USB mouse to be the CorePointer.

A very useful feature of an LCD screen is the ability to perform sub-pixel rendering to antialias fonts. Microsoft call this technology ClearType® and to enable it for XFree86 4.3.0 you must edit your fontconfig configuration. Mine is located in /etc/fonts/local.conf. The antialiasing is greatly improved when sub-pixel rendering is on, so I suggest you try it out to see whether you like it. I have installed and tested drivers for the HSF modem that comes installed, and while it works I've never found a use for it :-) Also, I think you now have to pay for the drivers.

Something very useful that you'll want to install is cpufreqd. With it, and the necessary support in your kernel, you can slow the CPU down when the laptop is on battery to conserve power. I haven't given it a proper test yet, but it certainly drops the heat output of the processor, so I assume it works :-) Strangely the CPU frequencies are specified in kilohertz and not megahertz.

One thing that I did at some point was get the TV-Out functionality to work, although I can't remember how! I needed to get a camcorder cable (one with a 3.5mm jack on one end and phono audio and composite video on the other end) to go from the laptop to the TV. I installed atitvout which gave dire warnings about lack of support for Radeon cards, but rest assured that it does work as long as the cable is plugged in when the laptop is first switched on. I can remember that I had to reconfigure X to startup at 800x600 resolution, and playing DivX movies didn't look too bad! Apart from that brief experiment I haven't used the feature, but when I do again I'll update this page with the information.

Conclusion

I reckon that the Vaio PCG-GRV516G is a great laptop to use with Linux, as all the features onboard are well supported by the projects concerned. I use mine every day for surfing the web and typing up work and it's survived quite well being lugged up to Uni everyday on my back. The TFT screen is gorgeous and it'd cost me a lot to replace so I think I'll be using the Vaio for a long while to come!

A short addendum regarding Sony's repair service

My Vaio recently developed a faulty fan. It made some awful noises and then stopped working completely. The laptop reached idle temperatures of about 70 degrees C, and it was out of warranty. I took it apart and saw that the fan would be quite difficult to replace, so I gave it to my friend Tristan who works in a computer shop, to sort out a repair. This is when the fun starts…

He contacted Sony, but they wouldn't offer a repair until he registered the laptop, as I didn't bother because I thought it rather pointless. Once registered they informed him they'd be sending a courier to his shop to pick the laptop up the following day, after charging him a £12.50 "support charge". The next day the courier did not arrive so he telephoned Sony and tried to get a reference number so that he could keep track of the status of the courier. After getting transferred between several departments he couldn't get any reference number, as no department seemed to know anything about the courier. Eventually, after nearly two weeks(!) a courier turned up at the shop to pickup the laptop. A week later Tristan rang up Sony again as he had heard nothing from them. They had "fixed" the laptop by blowing air through the fan! I found this quite surprising as I'd already given that a go, but if it works I can't complain too much, except about the terrible service and the cost (£37!). The only thing is, I'm in Bath the other side of the country to Tristan, but he says the laptop and fan are working fine. I'll have to see when I get home, I should think an install of Gentoo from stage 1 would stress the fan enough ;-)

I now have the laptop and it seems that Sony have done a good job with their vaccuum cleaner. The fan doesn't seem any louder, but the laptop hasn't reached a temperature of 65 degrees yet, even with a fresh Gentoo installation. I found that the laptop took so long to get repaired because it went all the way to Belgium, but I'm actually quite satisfied by the outcome. Including VAT, the "Non-repair charge" was £53 in case you want to know before you send yours off, which I don't think is too bad considering it does include the price of a courier. Of course if you need something fixed I couldn't possibly comment ;-)