Summary on Sony Vaio E-series hardware support

[ultiva]

Hello everyone.
I'd like to start this thread to exchange experience about running Ubuntu on Sony Vaio E series (mine is VPC-EB1S1E). I've managed to configure Ubuntu 9.10 for about 85% usability (and that is not enough), here is my summary:

1. ATI mobility radeon 5650 - works with fglrx driver, watermark can be removed, 3D accel and Compiz works, sadly looks like card does not display proper number of colours (gradiens look really messed up) - as far as I understand its up to AMD to correct this.

2. WiFi Atheros 9285 chip - "works" with ath9k driver. Link stability is very poor, often stop and wait during downloads. I'm out of ideas to make it function better. Tried Ubuntu 10.04 and it seems that there will be no much improvement. Same situation with windows 7.7.0 driver under ndiswrapper so I don't know if it is ath9k fault but it's Linux fault for sure - under Win7 driver 8.0.0 WiFi works superb.

3. Gigabit Ethernet (Marvell Yukon) - works perfect - if one manages to do some linking tricks in kernel sources and compile driver manually. Really hope it will be made working OOB, it is just one step ahead. Unfortunately Ubuntu 10.04 does not seem to correct this situation, on livecd this NIC still does not work.

4. Sound card Realtek 269 - also does not work OOB, it requires some hacks to the amplifer to work properly. Instructions are present on the Internet but I don't understand - if one line entered from terminal starts this sound card, maybe it can be made do work OOB ?

6. ALPS Touchpad - almost works - touchpad is functioning, but is detected as mouse. Also noticed that sometimes it does not react correctly for tapping under Ubuntu.

7. Camera - works OOB

8. Bluetooth - works OOB, additional I can say that Logitech V470 BT mouse works perfect, setup is very simple.

9. SD card reader - looks like it works, reader is detected, modules are loaded, hovever I haven't tested it.

10. MMC card reader - NOT TESTED

11. Screen brightness regulation - works OOB

If someone have additional experience please share it here, maybe we can make Ubuntu run flawless on this nice laptops before they became too old to use it

Regards
Piotr Sikorski

[cub]

Great stuff! I have been aiming to buy just this model (VPC-EB1S1E) and the Sony sales reps were all but helpful.

1. ATI mobility radeon 5650 - works with fglrx driver, watermark can be removed, 3D accel and Compiz works, sadly looks like card does not display proper number of colours (gradiens look really messed up) - as far as I understand its up to AMD to correct this.

Could you explain this a bit more in detail? I'm planning to use my laptop for sound recording and graphic design. Will the graphics be messed up so work in GIMP will not be correctly displayed?

[cub]

Did you run 32 or 64bit Ubuntu?

[istoff]

Hi,

Have a Vaio VPCEB17FG and running 10.04beta and updating daily.

Regarding wired ethernet, kernel 2.6.32 does not give me an eth0 device, but installing 2.6.33 from the kernel ppa makes it work.

Sound not working. Have the same problem as everybody else with no sound from speakers, very soft sound on headphones.

Graphics. Cannot install fglrx using stable ATI driver 10.3 or the built in gnome appearance wizard to download and enable ATI.

Would appreciate *any* info regarding sound / graphics on this machine.

Currently planning to move to Fedora13 when released as I believe they are using 2.6.33 instead of 2.6.32

Thanks,
Ian

[ultiva]

Hi

- Im' using currently Ubuntu 32bit 9.10, planning to move to 10.04 as soon as it's available

- ATI driver - I've managed to correct that gradient problem by 1. installing fglrx driver from ubuntu repo 2. installing catalyst 10.3 from amd web page on top on it 3. removing watermark. Now card seems to work 100% OK.

- Wired ethernet can be run on ubuntu 9.10 (2.6.31) - have to compile sk98lin driver. Little tricky but can be done and wired ethernet works good (one issue - driver does not report amount of transferred data). Kernel 2.6.33 have sky2 driver with integrated support for this NIS. I can post compilation instructions on sk98lin driver if you want it. You'll have to create some symlinks in kernel sources directory.

- Sound works but needs alsa from backports and some trick with program called hda_verb (not in repo have to download and compile) to correct some amplifier settings in the driver. This command has to be done every boot up and also sound preferences have to be open all the time (if not this setting resets itself). Patch is on it's way to alsa.

- Wifi ar9285 in my case works good with madwifi driver + patches for this chip. In addition on kernel 2.6.31 it throws some errors in dmesg but card works with no problems. On Lucid b2 64bit (2.6.32) driver also compiles smoothly and works without errors.

It looks that this laptop is capable of running at about 99% of it's capabilities under Ubuntu, but requires some work. This missing 1% is acpi driver not reading correctly AC power supply state - always display battery and message "discharging" on connected AC adapter. Can't wait for stable release of Ubuntu 10.04, I really like it's interface. It will be nice piece of OS.

In the mean time I've managed to make some tuning in Windoze7 to make it somewhat useful. That includes disabling or uninstalling anything that is not necessary including most of Sony's bloatware. Instaling Catalyst 10.3, and some useful GNU software. Now it at least more or less works and deserved to stay on my hdd

Tommorow I'll try to post some info about compiling sk98lin, hda_verb and madwifi.

Regards,
Piotr Sikorski

[istoff]

Hi

Just a quick update.

Yesterday, i upgraded to 2.6.32.21 and the wired network interface worked for the first time on a 2.6.32 kernel. I removed the experimental 2.6.34 and stable 2.6.33 kernels I had installed and it worked fine using the newest 2.6.32 kernel. This is awesome because this is a "supported out of the box" kernel.

Would appreciate a link to the sound fix.

Thanks,
Ian

UPDATE:
Sound working using hdaverb fixes posted elsewhere. Just the ATI5650 to go and then I'm sorted!

[cub]

- Sound works but needs alsa from backports and some trick with program called hda_verb (not in repo have to download and compile) to correct some amplifier settings in the driver. This command has to be done every boot up and also sound preferences have to be open all the time (if not this setting resets itself). Patch is on it's way to alsa.

I set up the Backports on my laptop yesterday but I couldn't figure out which alsa I was supposed to install. Could you provide some hints?

[onandcorei]

4. Sound card Realtek 269 - also does not work OOB, it requires some hacks to the amplifer to work properly. Instructions are present on the Internet but I don't understand - if one line entered from terminal starts this sound card, maybe it can be made do work OOB ?

To overcome sound problem on VPCEB1S1E,I've upgraded files related to alsa(driver,firmware,lib and utils) to 1.0.23 then problem is over.To download updated Alsa files:
http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Download