Hello all,

I’m a new member.  I’ve been reading the forum for a while but decided to join today so that I could post.  I just received my new VGN-TX651P.  It’s my third Vaio notebook, with my older ones being a TR and a C1. 

I purchased this notebook to be an extremely mobile Linux machine.  Unfortunately, as with most Vaios it does not appear to be a very Linux friendly machine.  I’m using Ubuntu 5.10.

I can’t get suspend to RAM or suspend to disk to work at all.  They’ll both suspend, but nothing I’ve tried allows them to come back.  I’ve even tried the latest RC kernels with the SWsuspend2 and ACPI patches.  This really limits the usefulness of an ultra-portable when you have to wait for the entire boot sequence each time you pull it out of your bag.

On a positive note, the video with hardware acceleration is supported out of the box on the TX with Ubuntu.  There’s no need to do anything special to enable the wide screen.  Everything else works with the exception of the SD and Memory Stick slots.  These don’t appear to be recognized. 

The buttons on the entire machine are soft buttons, meaning you have to catch their events with ACPI.  This doesn’t seem to be a problem with the exception of the volume up and down buttons.  They both send the same event and there is no way to distinguish between the two.

Until I can get suspend working, I won’t be able to use it as my daily machine.  Hopefully that can be ironed out either after more people get the machine and poke around on it, or newer kernels come out that support it better.  The screen is near perfect and the ergonomics are very good, though it does take some getting used to the scaled down keyboard.  It does tend to be noisy when the fan runs which has already been reported here.

If there are any other Linux users here, I’d love to swap notes and get suspend working.  Is there a forum out there for Linux Vaio users?

I have Slack 10.2 on my T350. Running 2.6.11, Gnome Dropline, ALSA, 1280x768 patch, BlueZ, ACPI module, ipw2200.

Everything works like a charm, suspend to disk too..

For the swsusp, follow the instructions here:

http://usefulinc.com/edd/notes/UbuntuOnSonyVaioTRSeries

Yes, I ran across that page while I was trying to get everything to work.  My experience so far is that both suspend to memory and suspend to disk are recognized and will cause the machine to become suspended correctly.  However, neither are capable of restoring the system correctly. 

Resuming after a suspend to disk works more often than not, but I haven’t found a reliable way to predict when it will fail.  When it does fail, it reads in the image on the swap partition and hangs there.

Resuming after suspending to memory has always failed for me.  It suspends just fine, but when I hit the power button again the screen stays blank but nothing appears to be happening.  After about 10 minutes, it gets really hot and the fan comes on until you turn it off.

I suspect differences in either the chipset or onboard video of the i910.  I’m still playing with a bunch of different things before suspending and when resuming the system.  I *think* I may be seeing a problem accessing the disk after suspension which might explain my symptoms.  I’m toying with changing the disk settings and unloading/loading modules to see if I can get better results.

[quote author=“drogillio”]Yes, I ran across that page while I was trying to get everything to work.  My experience so far is that both suspend to memory and suspend to disk are recognized and will cause the machine to become suspended correctly.  However, neither are capable of restoring the system correctly. 

Resuming after a suspend to disk works more often than not, but I haven’t found a reliable way to predict when it will fail.  When it does fail, it reads in the image on the swap partition and hangs there.

Resuming after suspending to memory has always failed for me.  It suspends just fine, but when I hit the power button again the screen stays blank but nothing appears to be happening.  After about 10 minutes, it gets really hot and the fan comes on until you turn it off.

I suspect differences in either the chipset or onboard video of the i910.  I’m still playing with a bunch of different things before suspending and when resuming the system.  I *think* I may be seeing a problem accessing the disk after suspension which might explain my symptoms.  I’m toying with changing the disk settings and unloading/loading modules to see if I can get better results.

I suspect the i915 is not well supported. If you hear the fan and it keeps getting hotter, it means something is going on the background and consuming 100% of the cpu…. So far I don’t have any problems with my T350, and will play with a TX651 at the end of the month and will let you know if I find out what is going on. Did you get the WWAM working? I still struggle to get my T350 to get the Sony Ericsson Modem to work.

[quote author=“Gilbert”]
I suspect the i915 is not well supported. If you hear the fan and it keeps getting hotter, it means something is going on the background and consuming 100% of the cpu…. So far I don’t have any problems with my T350, and will play with a TX651 at the end of the month and will let you know if I find out what is going on. Did you get the WWAM working? I still struggle to get my T350 to get the Sony Ericsson Modem to work.

Such is the curse of running brand new hardware under Linux   I still have hope that there is something I can do to make it work better, but so far I haven’t had any luck.

By WWAM do you mean the wireless modem?  If so, it’s not built in to the TX651P.  I knew that it would be unlikely to get it to work so I went with one of the models that didn’t include it.  I use a Bluetooth connection to my cell phone when I need connectivity away from home or the office.

drogillio,
  How does the wireless work in breezy, right away after install? Also, have you tried to get wpa working yet? Did you erase the entire contents of the hard drive and let ubuntu install over all or did you leave some things on there? I’m really considering getting this laptop and if I do, Breezy will be the OS on it, so I’m just trying to understand how well it will work. Thanks!

The 2200BG is pretty well supported under Breezy. That’s the card I’m using in my TR and it’s working very well using wpa_supplicant. I’m just kind of annoyed that WPA isn’t supported in network-admin.

What works:

The widescreen display with non-standard resolution was detected out of the box by Ubuntu and works perfectly.  The DVD writer, PC card slot, USB, firewire, ethernet, wireless ethernet, and bluetooth all came up with no problems.  As is usual with Sony products, all of the function keys are software activated.  I was able to get most of them working by changing the ACPI scripts.  Power control and CPU speed stepping worked out of the box.  The Alps glidepad works and I was able to enable all of its special features.

With a *lot* of tweaking, I was finally able to get suspend to disk and suspend to RAM working.  However, recovery is faster from suspend to disk so I don’t suspend to RAM at all.

What doesn’t work:

I can’t even see the modem, SD slot, or MemoryStick slot from Linux.  The two slots show as unsupported with lspci and the modem is just absent.  The volume up and down keys both report the same ACPI event and are useless due to my inability to distinguish which of the two has been pressed.  I can live with all of these, but I hit a show stopper with the video card.  As of now, there are no drivers to mirror the i915 video out to the external CRT.  I can get it working to extend the desktop through X.org and Xinerama, but there is no way to mirror the LCD to an external display.  As a person who does presentations at least weekly, this is really bad for me.  I tried using i855crt with the i915 patch, but it doesn’t seem to work on this laptop.  Strangely enough, it works fine on my company-issued Dell laptop.

There’s also one other general annoyance that drives me up the wall.  It happens in both Windows and Linux, so it must be something in the hardware or the BIOS.  Even when idleing, the fan comes on and then goes back off in about a 15 second cycle, constantly repeating.  I wouldn’t mind it if it ran all the time or not at all, but the constant on and off is distracting.

Drogillio, thanks so much for the report. So nice to see adventurous souls running Ubuntu on everything. I plan on doing the same.

Have you by chance asked Sony support about this fan issue? I planned to place an order for a TX next week, and I was wondering if I should hold off for a new batch, or if this problem is something that they can address with a simple BIOS update. If I know it’s something that they can fix with software
only then I’d be much more confident in ordering.

Cheers.

The first is the system restore partition.  I created the system restore DVD from Windows and then blew that partition away.  You only need it if you want to reinstall windows without having the DVD.

The second is the Windows partition.  It is required to boot Windows AND use the instant AV mode.  I uninstalled everything I could, defragmented, shrunk the partition down to a minimal size, then left it in place so that I can use the AV mode.  On my first attempt I actually deleted this partition which is how I found out itt was required for AV mode.  Trust me when I say it takes a long time to restore the system from a DVD

—drogillio

[quote author=“mfzap”]
Have you by chance asked Sony support about this fan issue? I planned to place an order for a TX next week, and I was wondering if I should hold off for a new batch, or if this problem is something that they can address with a simple BIOS update. If I know it’s something that they can fix with software
only then I’d be much more confident in ordering.

No, I haven’t contacted Sony at all.  I’m hoping that a BIOS update will fix it, but for now it is an annoyance that I must live with.

—drogillio

I meant to put this in one of my other replies but I forgot.  I’ve now lived with this laptop using Linux for three weeks.  Based on that experience, I would not recommend it for other Linux users.  The combination of the constant fan noise and my inability to get the display cloned on the external port really seal the deal for me.  I’ll probably be shelving it until I can find fixes for those two issues.

—drogillio

Thanks for all of your willingness to help drogillio. I’m sorry to hear of your fan issue. Mine doesn’t have this loud fan problem, so I assume I got a later model. I’ve started a forum thread on Ubuntu here, http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=476349 . I’m hoping this will help others in their linux quest and they’ll be able to help me on this too.

As for your problem with the touchpad, the version of the synaptics driver in the current Ubuntu repositories didn’t work correctly with my TR. Try using version 0.14.4 .