[Sony Vaio] Redhat 8.0 on Sony Vaio PCG-N505VX

Piece of Cake

Surprisingly, I couldn't find any HOWTO for the N505VX on www.linux-laptop.net or similar sites. But somebody must be the first :-) and there was enough stuff on very similar Sony 505's. Most of the HOWTO's were based on older distributions, and it looks like many problems have been solved over the years. I installed RedHat 8.0 and it was a very painless experience.

OK, so what is this Vaio. It has 64 MB of memory, 6GB diskspace and a NeoMagic graphics processor. I also have the original Sony external CD-ROM and floppy drive.

Because I didn't intend to leave any of the Windows stuff to remain, this time I won't bother you with dual boot options etc. I did a lot of that on my Vaio PCG-XG18, so I'm sure it would not give much problems on this 505, but given the 6 GB of diskspace, I decided to go for a Linux only notebook.

Install

I put the CD-ROM into the PCMCIA, connected the port-repeater to its connector and then the floppy to the USB on the repeater. Finally I hooked up an external mouse to the the USB on the laptop itself.

The system was booted with the first RedHat 8.0 CD-ROM in the drive and I didn't do any tweaking with the BIOS setup. During installation I did nothing special, created a 750 cylinder root-disk and the remaining 300-something MB as a swap partition, I let the system use Grub as the boot loader, made some selections in the package selection and that was it.

Oh yeah, the sytem recognized the NeoMagic graphics card itself, but I had to tell it explicitly to use a Generic 1024x768 LCD display. No big deal ...

Network

Because the CD-ROM occupies the only PCMCIA socket, I could only put in the network card (a 3COM type) when rebooting. The system recognized the new hardware and I selected DHCP to obtain an IP number.

Mouse and Mice

After doing the reboot and starting X-Windows, the only small issue was that the system only recognized the external USB-mouse. That was of course because I had selected a "USB wheel mouse" during installation. However, using the trackpad as an alternative is of course very desirable.

I got that working by using the following entries in my /etc/X11/XF86Config. 

Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier     "Anaconda Configured"
        Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
        InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
        InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
        InputDevice    "Mouse1" "SendCoreEvents"
EndSection

[...]

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Mouse0"
        Driver          "mouse"
        Option          "Device"                "/dev/psaux"
        Option          "Protocol"              "GlidePointPS/2"
        Option          "Emulate3Buttons"       "yes"
        Option          "ZAxisMapping"          "4 5"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Mouse1"
        Driver          "mouse"
        Option          "Device"                "/dev/input/mice"
        Option          "Protocol"              "IMPS/2"
        Option          "Emulate3Buttons"       "no"
        Option          "ZAxisMapping"          "4 5"
EndSection
There are symbolic links to these two devices (resp. /dev/mouse1 and /dev/mouse) but I went for the real devices. After restarting X I have now both mice working in parallel.

Other stuff

I haven't tested yet everything, so I'm sure I will get some surprises. For example I don't know what the power management or sound system will do. And my first attempt in getting my digital cameral connected was not successful. But I have the basics going and I will update this page with further developments. So far, so good....

And if this page has been helpful, let me know, and if you have different experiences, I will add as well.

[back home] [Sony Vaio XG18] [Linux Firewall]

  Willem van Schaik, Calgary, March 2003     http://www.schaik.com/wwwillem.html