Thu 09 Sep, 2010 [21:21 UTC]

SonyVaioUbuntu

Sony Vaio VGN-TX3HP

Ubuntu Edgy Eft (06.10) beta

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01-10-2006: I ordered this new laptop at http://iziprices.com and paid around 1900 euros (all VAT invluded). My goal was to get a very light laptop with a decent battery autonomy.

Because it's always a good occasion to test new distros when you get a new computer, I downloaded a bunch of isos and tested them. First, I tried Gparted v 0.3.1 and resized the 80Gb drive, trying to preserve the binboze partition (which I'll fire after, because I have no use for it, but for experiment sake I need to try).

Then I tried to boot on different live CDs. Unfortunately the gentoo-based liveCD I tried failed to handle the display, wireless internal card, and install step was also failing.

So I got an ubuntu. 6.10(b3) will be shipped in next days, so I got the beta version, that failed lamentably to boot. With 6.06 (dapper drake) on the contrary, everything went nicely. System booted, install processed, and it got all hardware working without any tuning.

Then I tried to see if binboze was still okay, I rebooted on it and it decided it was necessary to reinstall, and it whipped my linux partition. That's really a crap OS. So I tried a knoppix 5.0 but it failed to recognize screen size, like gentoo. Back to ubuntu 6.06 I updated it in 6.10 and wow, everything still work great, but in more, the suspend to ram works like a charm !(used gksu "update-manager -c -d", and changing dapper to edgy in /etc/source.list).

I also tried Apodio 4.3.9 for testing cd burner, and it booted well, screen brought no problem but the ipw2200 driver did no give anything. And the windowmanager default setup sortof sucks. So I went back with the gnome of ubuntu.

Details

lspci

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e2)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) IDE Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (rev 02)
06:04.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments Unknown device 8039
06:04.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments Unknown device 803a
06:04.2 Mass storage controller: Texas Instruments Unknown device 803b
06:08.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Unknown device 1093 (rev 02)

Specs

Genuine Intel(R) CPU U1300 @ 1.06GHz
80Gb hard drive
500Mb RAM
hda: TOSHIBA MK8007GAH (Capacity: 74.53 GB)
hdb: MATSHITAUJ-832D

CD R+W / DVD

CD and DVD read: Works out of the box
CD burn : works very well, burning whole cd in 9 mins.
DVD burn : works same way. Integrated burning in gnome is impressively simple.

wifi on eth1

ipw3945 works just fine

ethernet on eth0

e100 module does the job
eth0: negotiated 100baseTx-FD, link ok

video

1366x768 with i810 module

sound

Card HDA Intel, chip Realtek ALC262, works out of the box using alsa

suspend

suspend to ram works fine
suspend to disk failed, more tests needed
update 2006/10/17: acpi-support package was updated. Now suspend to disk works fine, and suspend to ram don't freeze when you do it twice.

battery

real 6:50 noticed at first power-out, impressive. Note that cpufred works very well and helps a lot.

Disk

hdparm -tT /dev/hda

/dev/hda:
 Timing cached reads:        2932 MB in  2.00 seconds = 1466.97 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:   72 MB in  3.01 seconds =   23.90 MB/sec

CPU

cpufreq makes cpu frequency change from 800 to 1Khz smoothly

USB

direct plug of cannon ixus 500 works out of the box.

Contributors to this page: mose .
Page last modified on Tuesday 17 October, 2006 [14:38:09 UTC] by mose .

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Harbaum

Another happy user

on: Tue 14 Nov, 2006 [09:25 UTC]

score: 0.00

Hi,

after reading this report and another one at http://www.delta-xi.net/tx3.txt i decided to get a TX3HP myself. Here are a few remarks from my side:

I successful started with the release version of kubuntu 6.10. I used the "alternate" i386 version since i had that one lying around on cd. So i don't know if the regular version would have worked as well. But at least the bypass via 6.06 isn't necessary.

I wiped the entire disk (rejecting the inital windows registration was so much fun) and installed kubuntu with default settings. Everything worked out of the box incl. the display at full resolution, WLAN, suspend to ram and suspend to disk, the dvd burner, cpu throttling. Even the powernowd was installed and running. I had read that cpufreqd is "better" so i tried that one as well. But i didn't see a significant difference. The only part that's only partly working is the SD/Memory stick slot. Most of my SD cards work (only a sandisk 2GB fails with some error message complaining about being unable to increase some buffer to 4Kbytes). But i had no success with a memory stick. But i only had one to test.

There are some commented-out sony related entries in the acpi scripts. Enabling these gave me an automatic adjustement of screen brighness when changing between battery and permanent power.

I haven't touched any system specific settings since the initial installation and i have used pretty much all of its features.

I noticed that the display claims that it's 40x23cm in size. I tried to adjust this in the xorg.conf. The change probably worked but i ended up with huge fonts everywhere. After half an hour of font size adjustement everywhere i ended up returning to the default (wrong) screen size settings.

The special buttons worked out of the box with the exception of the disk eject button and the volume up/down buttons. These buttons seem to be provided by the sonypi driver, so a little patch there may resolve this issue as well. But this is only a minor glitch.

To summarize: I have never seen nor expected a notebook to work that seemless under Linux. There are only very very minor glitches to report. And everything worked out of the box, so this is even doable for the average user.

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