The fat penguin on Sony Vaio CR

06Apr08

As I said in my earlier post, Vista didn’t last long. I was planning to install Gentoo in my Vaio CR 36 but couldnt, as it had problems with the ethernet card ( not to mention the wireless). My option was to install Ubuntu Gutsy as it has very good support for laptops out of the box. But Gutsy couldn’t get sound working and hence found a perfect excuse to upgrade to hardy beta.

24 after upgrading to hardy, came to know that beta_1 of gentoo 2008.0 is out. Downloaded the 64 bit mrinimal iso and got it up and running on my laptop. Things that doesn’t work in both the distros (as of now. May change as I RTFM more)..

  • Fn keys for the brightness controls. I have a brightness applet in my panel, so no real big deal.
  • The Ricoh webcam. lsusb picks up the device and whats more strange; the r5u870 driver gets loaded and the device node ‘/dev/video0′ is getting created properly. Neither cheese nor camorama could pick up the camera. The device id is “05ca:1839″, which seems to be well supported. Maybe I am missing something obvious (yes, the firmware files are in place)
  • The fingerprint reader. Its the same as that of the ones from the Thinkpads but thinkfinger doesn’t support vaios :S
  • Bluetooth, gets detected by hciconfig but other devices can’t see my laptop. (See below)

If anyone had any luck with the above, please let me know.

What works..

  • DRI with the binary ‘fglrx’
  • Sound works well
  • Wireless pwns with the iwl4965 module
  • Ethernet with the realtek modules
  • Software suspend to disk (and RAM) using patches from the TuxOnIce project
  • Volume keys and media keys work like a charm.
  • Adobe doesn’t offer support for flash on amd64. You can getaway with it by installing a 32 bit firefox binary alongside your 64 bit installation. ‘emerge mozilla-firefox-bin netscape-flash’ and you are all set.
  • Bluetooth works beautifully. I have had issues with I/O errors with the chipset. But a post to the gentoo forums solved the issue. This VAIO comes with a Broadcom 2046 chipset. Be sure to ‘emerge bluez-firmware’ just in case. Click here for the thread. Be sure to follow the wonderful gentoo bluetooth guide. emerge gnome-phone-manager and gnome-bluetooth for extra fun

The kernel .config and the xorg.conf with hardware acceleration for my laptop is here, in case if anyone is interested.

Gentoo-wiki has been a great resource. Information about other vaios here.


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7 Responses to “The fat penguin on Sony Vaio CR”  

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  1. 1 Onkar on April 7, 2008 said:

    You missed two things.

    1. Cheese uses whichever device is set as default by gstreamer. It shouldn’t have been your problem since you have only one device. Still try launching gstreamer-properties, set appropriate device as video source, test it and then try restarting cheese. I have no idea about camorama.

    2. For bluetooth you need to make your laptop discoverable and connectable. Can be done from the applet in panel or from System -> Preferences -> Bluetooth

    The issue you had with sound on gutsy was I guess due to those latest HD sound cards from Intel. Check https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Gutsy_Intel_HD_Audio_Controller

    Reply
  2. 2 sudharsh on April 7, 2008 said:

    @ Onkar:
    Thanks, i almost got 1 working, I am able to use the test feature from gst-properties after selecting the correct plugin. No joy yet with cheese :S

    Reply
  3. 3 Nobody on July 12, 2008 said:

    Try this command to test the webcam.

    mplayer tv:// -tv driver=v4l2 -fps 30 -nosound

    I have the same Ricoh cam on my vaio and it works fine with Cheese, tvtime and mplayer.

    Reply
  4. 4 sudharsh on July 12, 2008 said:

    Oddly enough it works with xawtv and mplayer, but not cheese

    Reply
  5. 5 khalil on July 19, 2008 said:

    i have a problem in installing a webcam driver for my sony cr23g.. its really giving me a tough time.. could u help me out

    Reply
  6. 6 Ludek on August 29, 2008 said:

    Hello, has anyone any experience with the VGP-UPR1 port replicator for this vaio? I’m concerned about the DVI-D port function. I’d like to connect 24″ lcd to this vaio. Will it work with linux?

    Reply
  7. 7 tpt on November 8, 2008 said:

    dude
    some please help out man.i am a new linux user.recently i installed ubuntu 8.04(hardy)on my vgn cr24g/b and my web cam, brightness keys andvolume keys dont work. Is there any software for hardy which supports the fingerprint reader

    Reply

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