Linux
on the Sony VAIO z505r
Linux
on the Sony VAIO z505rAllan Bonadio, Tactile Interactive Software Inc.
Originally written: Feb-Mar 2000
This revision: Oct 14, 2000
I got RedHat Linux 6.1 up and running on my Vaio, along with NT and some other stuff.
My biggest problem was that the touchpad has Tapping on by default. In
Windows, you turn it off with the control panel. In Linux, there's no such control
panel, but there is the program tpconfig.
Sony has been singularly unsympathetic to any and all Linux problems. Every time I send in a tech support question that has the word "Linux" in it, I get back a form letter that reads like:
SONY has not designed and is currently not in the process of developing
Linux drivers for the hardware components of the VAIO systems. If you
intend to install the Linux operating system on your PC, you will need
to contact your Linux distributor, or the individual hardware component
manufacturers for any available Linux hardware device drivers.
NOTE: The installation of a "Dual Boot" hard drive format may
disable several Windows advanced features and utilities.
We do not assist in, or support our VAIO systems in a
Linux "Dual Boot" configuration.
The VAIO Customer Information Services Center is unable to support any
operating system or configuration other than the one originally shipped
from SONY.
This is even when I tell them "I have a high volume page that sells lots of vaios to linux people" and "all I need is API info on your stupid trackpad - please forward this to a nerd with a brain". No help. No evidence of humanity.
I hear Dell and IBM are big on Linux, and they make laptops. Check out especially the IBM ThinkPad X Series, starting at 3.1 pounds. Also the Dell Lattitude LS is really cool and 1" thick just like the Vaio.
Penguin image stolen shamelessly and without permission from edi [at] agharta.de and http://www.weitz.de/vaio.html
I decided to get a start in the Linux world by buying a very cool laptop, with all the latest features. The problem is, with all the latest features, it's not necessarily compatible with everything.
I ended up reinstalling all of the operating systems many times, usually more than a dozen times. Part of it was, I wanted to "get it right". Part of it also was that I had no valuable data on the machine, so, hey, reformat the disk, no big deal. So in the process I started writing up this web page, hopefully saving some other people some time.
Windows 98 (comes with vaio)
Windows NT 4.0
Red Hat Linux 6.1 with kernel 2.2.12
This is not a start-from-scratch tutorial. If you haven't read the usual Linux material you should have read, you're going to have trouble. Yes, it is normal to spend hours learning about partitioning and formatting your hard disk, if you've never been exposed to it before. Read the linux instructions; everybody assumes you have already. There are no easy answers; this isn't the world of self-documenting software.
A word about linux: despite what linux fanatics will tell you, it's not easy to use. Things are always going wrong and you are expected to have some troubleshooting instincts to get through. You will have to try it several ways if it doesn't work the first time. Whatever "it" is. The reason is frequently there, somewhere, in the documentation. If you don't already have access to more documentation than you have time to read, that's not enough.
You will have to get good at the Unix command line. If you don't already know what the command "ls" does, and if you are not already a programmer, you should probably give up now. I started out with years of experience in Unix, and it still soaked up plenty of my time.
What I got was these two:
Sony VAIO z505r laptop
Sony CDRW51 CD-RW drive
The laptop has a 12" screen, which was important to me. A few other statistics:
64 megs ram
6.4 gig hard disk
366mHz Pentium II cpu
FireWire and USB ports
included floppy interfaces through USB
Other models of the Sony 505 have different specifications, which would imply, in some cases, that everything is the same except for a few megabytes or gigabytes here or there. But frequently they change components on you, for instance when they change from an S to an SX, they might change from a Pentium Celeron CPU to a Pentium II or III or MMX CPU, or from an IBM hard disk to a Seagate hard disk. Therefore, some details will inevitably change. Good luck.
I've been satisfied so far with 64meg of ram but I know that it's a bit confining. Typically with laptops, you get ONE ram slot, so if you upgrade a second time, your first upgrade is THROWN AWAY (the upgrade guy keeps it, or you keep it and it's a pain to sell it cuz by then everybody wants something bigger). So I plan to wait until maximum--size upgrades are reasonably priced and just go for that.
The machine comes with a set of several CDs. The main ones are the two "System Recovery" cds in a double-sided jewelcase. Pop those into the CD drive, boot up, push the right buttons, and your hard disk will be wiped clean and reset to The Factory Default Disk Setup:
Primary partition 1: 4 gigs of FAT32 constituting the C drive, with windows 98 and a library of additional software from Adobe to Symantec, total of about 1.6 gigs. WinZip is noticably absent. What were they thinking.
Primary partition 2: the Extended partition that contains all of the logical partitions.
Logical partition 1: 2 gigs of empty space, ready for video clips that you will shoot when you hook up your SONY(tm) video camera.
unseen: 64 or more megs reserved for Hibernate mode to save all of RAM into.
The strange thing about the system recovery CDs is the fact that the machine does not come with a CD drive. They give you a generous rebate on the CD drive that's supposed to go with it (which is otherwise overpriced). I tried to apply the CD drive rebate to the CD-RW drive, just sent it in, and I got a rebate, so I can't complain.
There's also an "Application Recovery CD" which has all the little extras that, if mixed with raw Windows 98, would reproduce the System Recovery CDs, give or take. i guess. There's also a stack of MS Works CDs that I've been afraid to open. If you do a Full Install, you'll get this stuff too.
USB and FireWire are the new up-and-coming interfaces for personal computers. In many ways they are similar; designed with a lot of thought about what does and doesn't work about scsi, serial, and other interconnects we've had for decades, these are both hot pluggable and they both fan out with special hub devices you buy. Sometimes they can carry power in the cable; in many cases (such as firewire out of the vaio) there is no power and devices must bring their own. Given enough cables, hubs and power sources, you can hook up as many devices as you can afford in a spiderweb of devices strung down the hall.
USB, the Universal Serial Bus, replaces all serial lines, all keyboard and mouse cabling systems, and the Centronics parallel port. It all goes over this one wire, 1.5 megabits/sec, faster than all the other systems combined. The primary goal is cheapness and ubiquitousness: a keyboard maker can buy this cheap chipset and do a standard interface that's fast enough... for a keyboard (how fast do you type?). The slow mode is fast enough for, think about it, garage door openers, devices to turn on or off the house lights, 56k modems, probably realtime audio, etc.
USB has a fast mode that's 8 times faster. Although it's a bit slow for hard disks (SCSI-1 is more than 3x faster), they are available, as are floppy disks and CDs. But, for instance, the top speed for a CD is about 8x or 10x because that's equivalent to the top speed for USB.
FireWire(tm) is an Apple trademark for IEEE 1394. Sony similarly trademarked the name iLink for the same standard. Although similar to USB at first glance, they are incompatible without some sort of adapter and i-dont-want-to-think-about-it logical interfacing (for instance, no keyboards are manufactured for firewire and no computers expect keyboards connected through firewire). FireWire is designed to be much faster, but more expensive and therefore somewhat less ubiquitous than USB. It comes in various speeds named S100 (100 megabits/second), S200 and S400, the latter two you get with the VAIO. It's supposed to replace SCSI - it's about as fast as the ultra ultra wide wide scsi flavors around, but with a cable the thickness of a clothesline rather than a garden hose. A big use is connecting digital video equipment together; it's fast enough to carry a few DV signals at the same time.
The Macintosh has made the 1394 market for peripherals like hard disks up until now. My VAIO manual shows how to connect an "iLink device" to the laptop and have fun: the device is a SONY video camera. (Which they are also handing out rebates for.)
The CD-RW I got (and presumably the standard CD if you got that) interfaces through a PCMCIA card. Once the drivers and stuff are loaded, it works well from Win98se (but it's a problem from other OSs).
There is a switch on the bottom of the CD drive to switch between "Recover" mode and "CardBus" mode; it may or may not be on the CDROM incarnation. In Recover mode (power light blinks, "16 bit"), it'll boot up the machine from the CD (really it works, even for the Linux installer CD). You can make a boot floppy disk with a version fo MSDOS that works with the switch in this setting.
In CardBus mode (power light on continuously; "32 bit"), it WON'T boot from the CD, and it'll also trigger Plug & Play driver loading, without which you're stuck. I think that writing to the CD only works in this mode. During Win98 operation, if you're just reading, it works given either switch setting.
I think it only pays attention to this switch as the CD powers up, which is a bit strange because it doesn't appear to power up until the PCMCIA card is plugged in. I've had a few times when I had trouble getting this visible from a floppy boot; certainly you need it to be in Recovery mode for that.
The plan is to triple-boot Windows 98, Windows NT 4.0, and RedHat Linux 6.1. That is, install all three on different disk partitions, and be able to choose among them at reboot time.
All of the Windows partitions need to be FAT16 partitions. NT can't understand FAT32 partitions (which came preinstalled on the vaio), although it can understand its own NTFS partitions. 98 can't understand NTFS partitions, although FAT32 is fine. I still can't figure out what company Microsoft is trying to drive out of business with this stupid arrangement. Linux can't understand NTFS partitions most probably, nor FAT32 partitions.
So it's FAT16 partitions all around, according to all my friends. And, the word is, install 98 first, then NT, then Linux.
1) Partition Disk
2) Install Win98
3) Install NT
4) Install Linux
Seems easy! I ended up doing it and redoing it several times, each time starting with a brand new Win98 installation and clean partitions, and each time ending with one too many installation mishap, then reformatting the bitrotten hard disk after saving some refugee data on a CD-R. Or not, as luck would have it.
This part should be easy but it wasn't.
Prepare a bootup floppy disk. You do this in Windows, some control panel. Make sure you have at least two of these. It's your only hope.
Somewhere, I think on a Sony web page, it tells how to alter this so that the CD works (reading only). You add some cd.sys files here or there, edit a few textfiles, should be OK. Maybe you don't have to do this for this installation process, but I did because it's handy to have.
You will be erasing your hard disk clean, erasing everything on them. Make sure to copy all valuable data off. Make sure you can copy that data from wherever you copied it off to, to get it back (don't laugh, happens to me all the time.)
Make multiple backups. The more valuable the data is, the more copies you make.
Make multiple copies with multiple different technologies: copy to floppys, burn some CDs, copy to fileservers over the network, whatever. That's because, if restoring from these backups fail, most often, they fail because of the technology, not because of luck. If the first floppy won't restore, probably the second floppy won't restore either, maybe because your machine is in a mode where it doesn't understand the USB floppy or something, so it's good you made a net backup.
If you chicken out and want to get back to the factory default for your VAIO, do this: set the CD to Recovery mode. Put the System Recovery Disk #1 into the CD. Power down. Power Up. Let the CD boot up. Ask for a Full Restore With Format. Keep on answering questions along the lines of "yes, erase it all. new partitions. All of it!!!" It helps to laugh maniacally.
In FDISK, ask for NO extended stuff (the initial question); this determines if you're making fat16 or fat32 partitions. (Sometimes fat16 is just called fat.) Delete all the partitions, in the order that FDISK forces you to. You have erased your disk.
I finally settled on this set of partitions which you have to make in this order:
C: 2 gigs of FAT16 for Win 98 (max size for fat16, see below)
extended partition: ask for about 4080mb, or remainder minus ram size, for hibernate
ram (ends up 4083)
D: ask for 1000 of FAT 16 for storage (ends up 1004)
E: ask for 1000 of FAT 16 for Win NT (ends up 1004)
after that: 2 gigs for Linux, as follows. These end up being invisible to windows
so there's no drive letters, but here's the linux names:
logical 3 = hda7 = swap, ask for 64 megs, you get 66
logical 4 = hda8 = boot, ask for 14 megs, you get 15
logical 5 = hda9 = root, the rest (1993 megs in my case, ends up being 1993)
You actually have to remove all the partitions down to nothing and recreate the C drive to set the MBR, in case the MBR is bad or wrong. Starting with a totally clean disk. There's no way to ask for FAT16 in fdisk, it just does it that way (or fat32, as mentioned). You'll set the partition type for the linux partitions later, during linux installation.
After partitioning, you must immediately reboot to your boot floppy. I barely understand why; I tried to do this once without rebooting, and I got screwed.
Then, do this:
> format/s C:
> format D:
> format E:
The problem with the recovery CDs is that they have to install Windows and all
the accessories as a lump. They give you three options:
1) Reformat the disk and install the whole thing
2) Reformat the disk and install "only" Win 98
3) Don't reformat the disk, and install the whole thing
Reformatting the disk doesn't always mean accepting FAT32 partitions (which would mess it all up). To really really go back to factory default, you choose reformat and all, and you have to answer a few more questions along the line of yes, delete my D partition, delete it all, all, maniacal laughter.
Unless you do this, it just sortof does a format c:, which erases the C partition back to whatever partition type it was before, 16 or 32. And it leaves the other partitions alone. So that's OK and I ask for Reformat and install "Just Win98". Far from it, you still get about one gig of stuff, whereas raw win98 is supposed to be only a quarter gig. You get lots of add-in stuff, drivers, whiz-bang stuff for the trackpad and what not. This is actually a good thing, at least from my perspective.
If I install the whole thing after doing my own partitioning and formatting, on a FAT16 system with those large clusters, that fills up 1.77 of the 2.0 gigs. Ripping out that which I decided was unwanted freed up another 220 megs, down to 1.55.
This is a big problem because, instantly, I have the Pregnant C drive problem: although I try to install new software on the D drive that has ample space, some software insists on installing part or all on the C drive, to be closer to the system. StarOffice, for instance, demands 12 megabytes on the C drive, even if you want to install the software on the D drive.
It's better to start with "just win98" and install whatever else you want from the Applications CD. Try to steer the installers to install new software on the D drive; you'll be glad later.
After you install Win98, always install the CDRW drivers and software immediately after. You get a floppy AND a CD; the CD has the fancy software to burn the CDs. The drivers to just read come in a floppy and depend on Plug & Play to operate. (I tried to do this once after installing NT and plug & play was disabled, even in 98, and there was no way to install the drivers otherwise that i could figure out.) You can install this stuff on D: to save space on C:.
I made a CD backup of my C drive at a state that I liked. This was so that I had
the freedom to totally trash the whole hard disk if that's what it took to get the
rest of this flying. Which is what it's taking. Restore didn't work properly, so
i'm doing what the pros do: just reinstall it from scratch all the time and get rid
of the bitrot.
Partitioning:
| Primary Partition |
Logical Partition |
size | type | windows name | linux device name |
linux directory name |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | maximum size, just under 2gb |
FAT 16 = type 6 | C: | /dev/hda1 | /c | |
| 2 | 3,964mb, just enough to leave 200m or so at the end for hibernation swap | Extended = type 5, includes all the logical partitions | /dev/hda2 | |||
| 2 | 1 | 1004 meg | FAT 16 = type 6 | D: | /dev/hda5 | /d |
| 2 | 2 | 1004 meg | FAT 16 = type 6 | E: | /dev/hda6 | /e |
| 2 | 3 | 73 megs | Linux swap = type 82 | /dev/hda7 | ||
| 2 | 4 | 14 megs | Linux = type 83 | /dev/hda8 | /boot | |
| 2 | 5 | 1846mb =remainder of space in ext partition | Linux = type 83 | /dev/hda9 | / | |
| hibernate swap | at least 64 megs, or whatever your ram size is | not a real partition, not listed anywhere |
Linux directory names /c, /d and /e are connected long after linux installation (see below). /boot and / are assigned during Linux Installation.
Some alternate schemes put linux in primary partitions 3 and 4 but I didn't. I was uncomfortable with the fact that MSDOS's fdisk can't undersand any primary partions other than 1 being the C drive and 2 being extended. All of the partitioning utilities seem a bit strange, inconsistent and dangerous.
Linux Swap Partition: hda7 is used by Linux to do virtual memory, somehow. When you set the type in the linux install process, with linux fdisk, Linux figures it out and latches onto it.
Linux Boot partition: hda8 ends up being just another Linux partition, although very small. It has the magical boot tracks that Linux needs to start up. I don't know why it has to be separate but it does. After Linux is up, you can go there and presumably fill up the rest of the space with useless files, I dunno. I was told it should be "less than 16 megs". No problems at 14 megs. But when linux is running, it says it's only using 2,650k. so you could probably trim off another 10 meg. I remember when my whole hard disk was 10 meg; now that's how much i'm squandering.
Hibernation Swap: the laptop has about five ways to "go to sleep" and move into a lower-power-consumption state. The most poorly functionining of these is Hibernate mode, where it takes RAM and writes it to the end of your internal hard disk. Then, it turns Off, Dead Off. Your laptop exists for days or weeks without burning the battery because it is Off, Dead Off. Upon restart, it remembers to restore this and hopefully you are on your way. Pay attention. It don't care about no disk paritions when it saves ram to the disk, it just writes it, and it's just two keystrokes away from anybody who has their hand on the keyboard. So it's best to make room for it, 64mb if that's all the RAM you have, or larger if you have plans for expansion. (But realistically, I reformat and reinstall so much I always just assume how much ram I have now. And Hibernate mode doesn't work well either.)
Use Win98's FDISK.EXE to make partitions. It should be on your rescue floppy. [I had the RedHat installer make for itself some primary partitions that overlapped the Extended partition. What a mess. Ended up reformatting everything. From now on I use FDISK.EXE] Leave the linux partitions "unknown" type; you'll fix that with Linux's fdisk program.
For the rest of this document, I'm assuming the above partitions. So, when you see me make reference to D: or, in the linux section, to /dev/hda7, remember that if you partition differently, your letters and numbers will be different.
How I recreate my Win98 C partition:
> format/s c:
maybe also reformat other drives, if you just repartitioned to create them. suit your situation. I always do /s just for kicks.
ctrl+alt+del to reboot with the Sony System Recovery Disk 1. Reinstall Win98 with "Windows 98 Only Restore Without Format". Runs for fifteen minutes. If you did a Full Restore instead of Win 98 only, it reboots, and asks for second CD, do it, another fifteen minutes.
Reboot into brand new Win98. Blow off as many questions as you can. Don't let Bill know your real name, or any personal information, like, you know, that problem with kryptonite.
The next time you reboot, switch the CD switch (bottom) to Cardbus, so it'll trigger P&P. Keep rebooting until it notices that there is a new device. Then, you wander through dialogs and feed it the floppy disk for the CD drive.
Then, I usually do the CD for the CDRW. So I can burn another CD-R that'll be useless when it comes time to reinstall. Although you can use MSBackup to make backup copies of your system, they don't do any good as the only way to recover it is to run MSBackup which is only available on Windows 98, on the hard disk. DUUU!!! There seems to be no pcrestor.bat program, which would save one's butt.
NetBEUI or NetBIOS is Microsoft's fileserving and printserving network OS. Actually they're different things, don't ask. The Vaio and Windows have too many on/off switches that need to be on all the time, but default to being off. To get NetBEUI up, at least the way I have it set up, make these control panel settings, if they are not already set:
Sony Notebook Setup: under Ports, make sure to turn on the Ethernet port.
System -> "Device Manager " > Intel 8255 > General > Enable Device
The rest of the settings are all in the Network control panel.
Identity: set this
The rest of the settings are in the deceptively thick tab section of the Network Control Panel, called Configuration. Note there are four kinds of entries in the scroll box, not to mention a few other buttons. Double click on the entries, being careful to choose the right ones.
Client for Microsoft Networks: turn on Logon Validation, set domain to your workgroup. Turn on Quick Logon.
the item "Intel 8255 Ethernet adapter":
driver type = enhanced
bindings = tcp/ip, make sure that's on; OK
the button "add protocol" -> microsoft -> netbeui
the item "netbeui -> intel 8255" => bindings = turn on all
advanced -> "set this protocol to be the default protocol" turn it on.....
the scrolly box Primary network Login: Client for Microsoft Networks
the button File and Print Sharing -> turn on "access to my files"
OK on Network Control Panel. Reboot and you should be able to see other wintel machines on your ethernet.
The touch pad has "tapping" on by default. That means that if your finger hits the touchpad by accident, that counts as a left mouse click. Big pain, at least for me; I guess someone thought it was a good idea.
Related to this, when I type, often times the window decides to close itself, which is particularly annoying on the MS DOS window, as there's no confirmation dialog, it just goes away. Here's how to fix both of these in MS/DOS (for Linux go here).
In the Mouse control panel, in Functions tab, turn your Right Corner Assign to NONE. Maybe also the left. Maybe also turn off the other check boxes. These are greyed out if Tapping is off, although the effect still happens.
In Tapping, turn OFF tapping.
OK, and you should be in business. I haven't figured out how to do this in Linux. grrr...
The Windows NT Workstation 4.0 CD comes with several directories for different cpu chips. The i386 directory is for me. I guess I could get the PPC directory to fly on one of my macs... someday, when i'm like really bored.
I tried it twice to install directly from the CD but it just hung up somewhere in the process. This trick was from a friend of mine. The way to install Windows NT is to get the CD, take the i386 directory and copy it to a hard disk, in my case, D. Then just open it up there and get an MS DOS window. Then do:
C:\WINDOWS> d:
D:\> cd i386
D:\I386> winnt /t:e /b
The install procedure copies megabytes from the install medium (the i386 directory that is now on your hard disk) back to your hard disk (yep) in directories with dollar signs in their names, some of which are in the C drive, so if you have no space on the C drive it will unceremoniously fail. Then, it messes with your boot loader and replaces the one that just boots 98, with a dual NT/98 bootloader. Except at this phase, it doesn't boot NT, it boots the NT installer, in other words, the finish-installing-NT installer, cuz duuu, you're in the middle of installing.
Windows NT Workstation Setup:
hardware list: No Changes
partitions: just press Enter on partition E, don't format (it'll give you NTFS)
confirmation: Leave the current file system
choose location: \WINNT (the default)
if reinstalling: confirmation screen, just hit Enter
examine hard disk: ESC because we know our hard disk is perfect (wink wink)
Then, you have to reboot again. And again, the reboot puts you into yet another "installer". This time, the options to boot include the final two,
Windows NT Workstation Version 4.00
Windows NT Workstation Version 4.00 [VGA mode]
Microsoft Windows
Setup Options: Portable
Emergency Repair Disk: NO (won't recognize the vaio's usb floppy)
Components: most common
Tell the installer to not bother trying to hook up the modem; it can't detect it
and needs some other magic that I don't understand.
NT got installed, but it doesn't understand the CD or the usb floppy disk, of course it needs drivers. Also, the video drivers are kindof standard for VGA at, I think, 600x800. This is either displayed in the center of the screen (which sucks) or, by doing Fn+F, you can magnify it to fill the screen, with the associated hideous aliasing problems (jaggies that don't go away) (which sucks).
Once you begin the NT installation, your system now becomes multi-boot. Upon bootup, you get a dorky B&W text display giving you three options: boot Windows, boot NT, or boot NT with some video something. If you get NT installed, there's a control panel to hack on this list (NT is the default, and re-starting the failed installation is the default if your installation failed). Or, you can edit boot.ini on C: if you can't get to that control panel.
Install System Commander Deluxe at this point. This way it'll pick up 98 and NT from the boot loader that NT leaves behind.
For some reason, NT gets goofed up and you have to reinstall it a few times. I tried the "R" option to overhaul an existing installation, but it terminates when you don't have a CDROM drive. Even if you do, even if it's plugged in and blinking in your face. sigh. So you do a full reinstall.
The best I've been able to do with just the 'retail' NT installer cd is 800x600x4 bits (16 colors). This is a big disappointment, as the screen can do 1024x768x16 bits (32768 colors), maybe even 24 bits.
I've gone to the NeoMagic and the Sony websites on this, they're no help. Then one day I got this email:
Sender: dave [at] luke.cpl.net
Date: Sat, 25 Mar 2000 02:18:58 +0000
From: Dave Riesz <driesz [at] cpl.net>
X-Accept-Language: en
To: bonadio [at] tactileint.com (now obsolete)
Subject: nm256av drivers for NT
Allan,
While perusing your information about the Sony Vaio z505 at
http://tactileint.com/linux/vaiolinux.html, I noted your request for
ideas on getting the Neomagic video to work under Windows NT. I did a
bit of searching, and found the following:
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/mobile_computing/software/n256nt42.exe
Which is for HP's notebooks, but works just fine for the Vaio. In fact,
it doesn't even mention HP anywhere and seems to have been developed by
Intelligraphics.
Why it isn't available from either Neomagic or Intelligraphics, I
haven't a clue.
Regards,
Dave Riesz
Thanks Dave! I got it to work.
You run the installer under NT, it's a quarter meg and unwraps to fill a directory. Read me file, it's pretty easy to get installed.
I had to futz around with the Display control panel a bit to get it to work, and wake up the next morning and try it again. If the control panel itself can't expand your desktop in the moment, you haven't done it right. You don't have to reboot to see if it worked.
This is the version of the file I downloaded in late March 2000, I saved a copy.
I wimped out and got a commercial boot manager. Fifty bucks, so I can avoid messing around more than necessary. There's stories that you can get NT's boot manager to boot up Linux. At least on a desktop. Good luck.
Except for the USB floppy disk problem below, I found SCD to be robust and I got up quickly with it. They actually hired a graphic artist and the color combinations look nice. They also must have hired a Human Interface person, because I found the UI to be better than anything you'll find, for instance, on Linux. Whatever you need to do, it's there, when something goes wrong, it tells you. Even if you run amok on your disk and erase its stuff, a bare bones version comes up and feebly asks what partition to boot up, not knowing any better.
You can buy it and download it at 3am. You get a directory of stuff, you run the Setup program and it'll try to generate two floppy disks. YOU CANNOT DO THIS ON THE VAIO. You must have a different PC which does not have a USB floppy disk, otherwise you are sunk. I used a Macintosh running Virtual PC. Apparently that's more standard than the Vaio.
Once those floppy disks are created, those are the installers. Boot up from the first one and that'll manage the installation of SCD on your vaio. You CAN boot up from these floppys; booting from the USB floppy is OK. Install yada yada.
When running it, just remember that any underlined letter means to hold down Alt. The readme urges me to read Chapter 3... still haven't.
The whole time I was salivating for Linux. This is mostly because of its hype.
It certainly wasn't because of its cost to me. Once you get to a certain age, you realize that your time really is worth money. You buy software on CDs in packages with documentation, because that saves you the time of printing and downloading. Not to mention the time to download it again after some setting wasn't right, or to print it again after some font wasn't right.
Anybody who can figure out a Linux installation is worth at least us$30/hour, at least in western countries. Most are worth much more. Usually, when I buy software, the time cost of installing it, learning its features and learning to avoid its bugs, completely overwhelms any cash price.
Early on, I just tried compressing the C drive with that FIPS program, but I squeezed it too far (probably forgot to reenable virtual memory) and Win98 choked upon booting. Maybe I could have saved it, but hey, I had to reformat the whole sucker anyway.
It's good to have win98 dual booting if you run linux; this is the only way to do dialup websurfing with the modem, for instance. It's good to get NETBios between your computers on your LAN working while in Windows, to make sure it all is there, before going into Linux where it's more of a jungle.
Besides partitioning, you have to collect important details about your hardware for the install. The important stuff I needed was this:
Hard Disk:
Memory: 64 megs
CD-ROM: nothing that you've heard of
SCSI Adapter: nope
Network Card: don't worry about it
Mouse: Alps Glidepoint (top of the list)
Monitor: Laptop Display (1024x768), NeoMagic
To do a hard disk install, copy the RedHat directory off of the CD onto your hard disk in a fat16 partition. It seems easy but the RedHat 6.1 CD comes with a fatal flaw: every directory has a file in it whose name appears in Windows as "<translation table>". This file cannot be copied with Windows Explorer, nor with MS DOS, because its filename is illegal. And EVERY directory has it. Therefore, you can't just grab the RedHat directory and drag it over, unless you can somehow mount both the CD and the target hard disk in either Linux or MacOS.
So this is what you do, it turns out you don't need ALL of the RedHat directory. On D:, make a directory "RedHat", same capitalization. Inside that, make directories named "base" and "RPMS". Watch your capitalization. These are the only two directories you need, and neither has subdirectories. You just copy the insides, ctrl+A to select all the icons, and ctrl-click to unselect <translation table>, then drag across. base has just a few files, but RPMS has more than 700. Copy over those two directories, plus what's in the RedHat root, and that should be enough for the install.
do a or b:
a) Put RedHat disk 1 into cd. Set switch to "Recovery". POWER DOWN, don't just reboot.Then power up.
b) Put the Red Hat boot floppy in the drive.
Reboot. At the boot: prompt, type "expert", then Enter.
boot: expert
It'll reply "Loading initrd.img..." and lots of dots. Then "Loading vmlinuz..." and more dots (yes that's how it's spelled.) Then you get lots of text streaming by, pages, and then a phony GUI will come up.
You will be bummed out using this fake GUI if you are used to a Mac, and maybe also if you use Windows all the time. The mouse is useless and the Enter key does different things in different situations. In general, you hit Tab to "select" the various dialog items, and hit Spacebar to actuate buttons or flip check boxes. It reminds me of setting time on a wrist watch: with only a handful of buttons you end up pecking away at them to get to the right submode to move you into the other right submode. Except that the rest of the keyboard, that could have made it cool, is there, unused. Too late; this user interface has been standardized over the years.
For the typical dialog box, the way to do OK is to tab around till the OK button is selected and hit spacebar.
Sometimes arrow keys are useful, although it's like the Enter key, what they do depends on the situation. Sometimes they are used to change a setting, sometimes they navigate you to different dialog items. I'll tell you in these directions when you can or should use Enter or the arrow keys.
Then answer questions like this (i'll give windowtitles and answers):
Devices: Cancel [this is for special device drivers for the installation process]
Choose a Language: English
Keyboard Type: us
Installation Method: hard drive [i couldn't get CDROM to work, even with the ide2
magical incantations]
Select Partition: /dev/hda5 (leave other blank blank) [If you copied the RedHat didrectory
to a partition other than the first logical partition, use something different.]
Devices: Done [yet more devices and drivers for the install process]
Red Hat Linux: OK
Installation Type: Install Custom System [I've used for instance Gnome workstation,
but then it does its own reformatting and repartitioning, and makes other choices
that I didn't want. If you didn't need windows or NT, those would be options.]
now at this point, if your hard disk partitions are set up for Linux (you've gone through this part of the install before), you CAN choose Disk Druid and then go to Disks Done further down in the directions. If you're not sure, keep on going here.
Disk Setup: fdisk
Disk Setup: Edit
Now you are in the linux fdisk program, not to be confused with the MSDOS fdisk program. Same name. Same general function. Totally different commands, totally different way of looking at the problem. This linux fdisk program will allow you to totally mess up your partition table. You are assumed to know what you are doing. Even if you don't know... ok, i'll stop.
Remember the linux partition naming system. Your first primary partition on your first disk is /dev/hda1, sometimes shortened to hda1. Since there can be no more than four primary partitions, they are hda1 through hda4. The first logical partition is hda5, and they number up as far as needed. This is true whether your extended partition is primary partition 2 or 4 or whatever.
If you have a second disk on the same IDE controller, it's hdb instead of hda. If you have another controller, the first disk is hdc. Or something like that. Your first scsi disk has partitions that start at sda1 and so on. I sure hope they make usb disk partitions be /dev/uda and firewire partitions /dev/fda.
So this is a short-answer program. Type the folowing commands (comments to right -- do not type the hyphens or anything after them):
p -- take a look at the partitions you have, should make sense
t Enter 7 Enter 82 -- sets log 3 partition to Linux Swap
t Enter 8 Enter 83 -- sets log 4 partition to Linux
t Enter 9 Enter 83 -- sets log 5 partition to Linux
p -- You should get a table that looks like this:
| Device | Boot | Start | End | Blocks | Id | System |
| /tmp/hda1 | * | 1 | 277 | 2094088+ | 6 | FAT16 |
| /tmp/hda2 | 278 | 830 | 4180680 | 5 | Extended | |
| /tmp/hda5 | 278 | 413 | 1028128+ | 6 | FAT16 | |
| /tmp/hda6 | 414 | 549 | 1028128+ | 6 | FAT16 | |
| /tmp/hda7 | 550 | 558 | 68008+ | 82 | Linux swap | |
| /tmp/hda8 | 559 | 560 | 15088+ | 83 | Linux | |
| /tmp/hda9 | 561 | 830 | 2041168+ | 83 | Linux |
Pay attention to the last three items on the rightmost column, those are what you just set. The boot * on hda8 might also be set, this is ok. The start, end and block numbers aren't that critical, probably if they are off by 10% it's normal, or more if you asked for something different.
v -- it'll say there's like 136452 or so unused blocks, that's ok, that's the
hibernate area, as long as it's larger than 128 x 1024 it's ok.
w -- This will quit fdisk and save stuff.
Back to the phony GUI dialogs:
Disk Setup: Done
Come here if you skipped over the disk partition stuff last section.
Current Disk Partitions - at this screen, use arrow keys and this other box that pops up to set hda8 to /boot and hda9 to /.
arrows to select hda8 and type Enter "/boot" Enter
arrow down for hda9 and type Enter "/" Enter
then push F12 to continue. [Theoretically you could ask it to mount your C, D and E drives, but I think this causes problems down the road. I'll do that in a later step. As usual, adjust this for your partition scheme, I'm using logical partitions 4 and 5 as the boot and root partitions, and 3 for the swap partition.]
Choose Partitions to Format: OK (make sure both are starred) [If you leave them unstarred, your disk partitions won't be formatted. I trued to save old disk contents, but the installer bombed out every time, usually after two long hours, all of which had to be done over.]
LILO Configuration: hit space to check Use Linear Mode, then choose OK [this might have only to do with scsi, or might be irrelevant, I do this to play it safe.]
LILO Configuration: down arrow to select First sector of boot partition, then OK [If you weren't using a real boot manager, you could use lilo to switch between dos and linux bootup, I've done that, it works. "dos" really means "ms windows". When linux is installed, you'll see. It boots up and briefly shows a "boot:" prompt. At the "boot:" prompt, type dos or linux. But I have NT and fifty bucks and want some more freedom so I got System Commander.]
LILO Configuration: just choose OK [This is what i was talking about - theoretically LILO is a boot loader that can cause any partition to boot up. In reality, it can boot Linux and Windows 98/95. If you're really sharp you can figure out ways to have more than two entries that are useful. The middle two entries (storage FAT16 partitions D and E) I'll bet they just boot up Win98.]
Hostname Configuation: i choose the name "lhasa", the capital of Tibet, you choose whatever
Mouse Selection: arrow all the way to the top, ALPS - GlidePoint. Tab, and hit Space to turn on 3 button emulation. Tab OK.
Time Zone Selection: Tab, then use arrow keys to choose your time zone. They are alphabetical by, um, continent or country, sortof, the strangest list i've ever seen. In the US, just push the down arrow to select your time zone. Type E if in Europe. Otherwise, try the first letter of your country or continent. Tab OK. [Yeah, if you want your laptop to be on GMT, you can figure this out. Good luck.]
Root Password: you can change this later. [I use a low-security password. It's my laptop, just me here.]
User Account Setup: add yourself, like your email name sortof. If you are really paranoid, add a made-up name. You can remove these later.
Authentication Configuration: leave all settings as they are, OK.
Package Group Selection: You are now choosing what pieces of Linux to install. Despite the fact that you might have no idea what any of them are. I choose almost everything cuz I have room for it; it'll be 1.4 gigs or so. Including the "Everything" item at the end of the list - nobody's ever told me if that overrides the others, or if there's an obscure linux package named "Everything", I dunno, I just turn it on.
Besides the defaults, turn on the Web Server, it's a good way to test to make sure everything works.
Do NOT turn on "Select Individual Packages" - that will lead to yet more questions whose answers you don't know.
X Probe Results: OK [should say Video Card: NeoMagic (laptop/notebook)]
Boot Disk: No [because the installer can't understand a usb floppy.]
Installation to Begin: OK
Now it'll take a two hours, installing packages. Its time estimates may be way off initially, just go have lunch or whatever. The final estimate is very good, and it's very close to two hours on my system, just like it says.
I've had it "crash" in this process. A box comes up, in the same phony-gui style, and the window title is "Exception Occurred". A big long error message from what appears to be some sort of python traceback. Sort of vomits on for several lines. It starts with "Traceback (innermost last):". Then, yeah, there's a scroll bar on the side, doesn't it sortof look like a scroll bar? Whatever. You actuate OK by hitting the space bar and everything shuts down and they let you reboot and run the install over again. Seems this happens about every other time for me. Just start the installer over again, you'll see.
This is when it happens, this is the window uncovered when the exception window
goes away:
window title:Post Install
window content: performing post install configuration...
Another explaination is, you've perhaps got your RedHat directory messed up. Or not! Who knows. Try running it again, I've had it bomb out and then I just reinstall (answer all these questions again) and it works.
Or, you're trying to add yourself as user again.
Monitor: Laptop 768x1024
Screen Configuration: Don't Probe
Video Memory: 2mb [really you have 2.5mb but 4mb is too much, although it might let
you run 16 million colors on the full screen]
ClockChip Configuration: No Clockchip Setting
Probe for Clocks: skip
Select Video Modes: turn on ONLY the two modes that are 1024x768. OK. [if you turn
on other modes, one of them might become the default, and that's inconvenient.]
down down space tab down down space tab tab space
Starting X: OK
long delay as it actually starts up The X Window System, the lowest layer in your GUI for linux. Two easy dialog boxes that are real and graphical. If you don't hit the first one,it'll assume that the screen is seething like a pond full of pirannah and that graphics mode doesn't work.
Can you see this message: YES
can set this up...: YES
Complete: OK
Then the machine will reboot, thinking at least it's ending up in Linux land. Kindof depends on your boot loader. Eject the CD and/or floppy disk as it's rebooting.
I think you have to be logged in as root to do all of these things. But they're fun. You also should have a terminal window open, that's where the action is.
After you mount one of these disks you can browse through it with the gui file thing. But it gets confused easily when these things mount and dismount. Trust the command line tools.
To get a command line window, click on the icon near the middle of the bottom, it's got a picture of a video screen with a small footprint in the corner. If you're running KDE, the icon is different; use the mouseovers to figure it out.
This is a very basic basic introduction to Emacs, just to get you up and running quickly so you don't have to use vi, which is a longer story. If you've ever used Emacs, you know all of this already.
At a command line, type:
> emacs thefile &
where thefile is the name of the file to edit. A window will come up showing your
file, plus some stuff around the edges that are supposed to be menus, scroll bars
and status bars.
If you forget to type the &, you will not be able to get a command prompt in your shell window. To fix this if you do it by accident, in your shell window, type the keystrokes ^Z b g Enter and it'll be fixed. Or, if you just quit emacs (below), your shell will come back, no big deal.
Typically when it starts up, the shell window will give you stupid error messages in the shell window:
Warning: Cannot allocate colormap entry for "DarkSlateGray"
Warning: Cannot allocate colormap entry for "Wheat"
Warning: Cannot allocate colormap entry for "Orchid"
These can safely be ignored as harmless, unless the colors emacs uses by default hurt your eyes. Lighten up, there's worse things ahead. These messages have been coming out for years, probably decades, and nobody thinks it's a bug.
Things that work that are like normal non-unix gui editors:
- works: click to set the caret down
- doesn't: click and drag to make a selection except sortof kindof, it's different.
- works: arrow keys to move selection
- doesn't: dragging to select, and then typing over it
Be sure to move the pointer away from your emacs window while you type, as light taps on the 505 touchpad can cause spurrious clicks, suddenly causing your text to end up somewhere else.
To cut, click and select what to cut. Type ^W to cut it. Click at the place you want the text to go. Type ^Y to paste it in (Yank). Repeat for multiple copies.
To Save your file: ^X ^S
To Quit emacs: ^X ^C
Some hints on the hints at the bottom of the emacs window:
C-x refers to the keystroke ^x or ctrl+x
M-C-v refers to Alt ^v
(C stands for Ctrl; M stands for Meta, which always seems to be Alt or Esc as a prefix.)
This is handy: make a subdirectory off of your home directory named "bin". Put a file there with two lines:
Save and exit. Then, still in that directory, issue this command:
> chmod +x e
Now, you can edit a file in any directory easily by typing the command:
> e filename
and also you can use it with multiple files although the emacs gymnastics are beyond the scope of this writeup.
[possible problems: make sure ~/bin is in your path]
just for kicks:
type:
> mkdir /c
> mount /dev/hda1 /c -t msdos
> cd /c
> ls -l
permanently:
Make three, or however many, subdirectories off of the root, named after each of your dos disk partitions: c d e
Add these lines to the file /etc/fstab:
/dev/hda1 /c msdos default 0 0 /dev/hda5 /d msdos default 0 0 /dev/hda6 /e msdos default 0 0
If all goes well, they will show up as /c, /d and /e or whatever, after you SAVE the file and reboot.
The device numbers are a bit counter intuitive; the setup I have is typical if you have three disk partitions on your vaio. Usually your C drive is /dev/hda1. If you have other DOS/Windows partitions, probably they start with /dev/hda5 and are numbered upward (logical partitions), and probably they end up being drives D and E, on upward. If you had another hard disk that linux could get to, this would all change, but as of this writing, I don't know how you could get that to happen.
It's already built in and funcitonal, if you get the off-the-shelf, overpriced CDRW (or probably also CDROM) from Sony.
You always need to have the switch on the underside set to Recovery (16 bit) mode, pulled forward toward the door. Switching this while the system is already up risks crashing it.
just for kicks:
Start with the PC card removed from the laptop.
Put, for instance, the RedHat cd in the drive, and plug in the pcmcia card so the driver has a chance to load. You should hear the hard disk in the vaio and the cd both spin up and do something. The BUSY light on the cd should indicate activity.
Then, in a terminal window, type in
> mkdir /cdrom
> mount /dev/hdc /cdrom
and see if it spews out positive or negative messages. If it says it's mounted read-only, that's about as positive as it gets. If all goes well, you should be able to read the files in the directory /cdrom, and wander around just like it was a unix filesystem.
(Yes you can use other names besides /cdrom; just make sure to create the dir beforehand. Whatever used to be in /cdrom will be hidden for the duration.)
Use a command line. (The gui tools, as usual, dissapoint.) Stick in a floppy and
enter:
> mount /cdrom
> ls /cdrom
You should see the top level directory of the cdrom.
It should recognize many different formats automatically. If the mount command
complains about how you need to specify the type, try one of these variations:
if it's a wintel cd> mount /dev/hdc /cdrom -t msdos
if it's a macos cd> mount /dev/hdc /cdrom -t hfs
if it's a 9660 cd> mount /dev/hdc /cdrom -t iso9660
When you want to put away a cd, do this:
> eject /cdrom
When it pops out (the cd tray slides out, not the pcmcia), you've dismounted and stuff.
If it complains that it's busy when you try to eject, try closing more windows. A shell that has a directory on the cd set as its current directory is counted as "busy". Also, any file browser that's open, even if it never opened any cd directories. Just keep closing windows until it lets you eject.
The Linux "explorer" panel gets confused easily when you mount and eject these; refresh often.
Here's something I tried and removed. I had put this line into the file /etc/fstab:
/dev/hdc /cdrom auto default 0 0
After you reboot, this will be more automatic, you can type in just "mount /cdrom" and it'll figure out the /dev/hdc part automatically. Big deal. You can put an alias in your .bashrc file, that's easier. This also has the uncomfortable side effect that while booting up, you will get red "FAILED" messages (maybe two or three) and if you look carefully it'll be complaining about /dev/hdc, our CD. This seems to be harmless but unnerving. This happens even if there's a disk in the drive as it's booting up; no, it won't be mounted for you.
I think /dev/hdb is the "memory stick".
I've had situations where Linux hangs up during boot, right after a message about how it's starting up pcmcia. Eject the pcmcia card from the side of the laptop, and boot will continue. You can insert it again later. Eventually this went away for me; not sure why.
sorry, I haven't figured this out yet. There's a big HOWTO all about it. It takes longer to read the HOWTO than it takes to reboot into Win98 and format and write a CD-R the first time. Seems easier to just move the data to a Windows partition and write it from there, whatever you have to write.
Sorry, I haven't figured this out yet. Despite the fact that I tried to mount everything named fd or sd. I'm pretty sure there's a way. It's a USB floppy. They're working on it.
I don't know. There's two parts to this:
1) general USB driver, the underpinning for all the different kinds of devices
that can talk over USB
2) specific USB drivers for each kind of device. Gosh I wish I could get the wheelmouse
I bought going.
Christopher Gori says:
I think this is difficult or impossible. This is part of the big "winmodem" problem.
The short story: most laptops (such as ours) have a cheap modem that's mostly software. The software is built in to the Win98 that ships with it. Unfortunately this is not available under Linux. And, the details needed for a programmer to write such code are kept corporate secrets, so it's a long shot that it'll ever happen.
Go to the Linux on Laptops web page and search for the word "modem" for more info.
An external modem should work, hook it up through the expander port thing.
This is a good excuse for getting a wireless modem that hooks up through USB.
KDE and Gnome are the main two GUI systems you get with RedHat linux. Also remember these terms that are also names for your GUI system, sortof:
X, X11, XFree86, Qt - you have these
Motif, OSF, CDE - you do not have these
Enlightenment - this goes with Gnome
When I installed it, in the section on selecting what components to install, Gnome was on by default but KDE was off, I set it on so I had both. By default it comes up in Gnome.
The easiest way is to change it for one session is in the login screen, the first pulldown menu, Session. The default is "Default". Of course it doesn't tell you what the default is, you have to boot up with "Default" to find out.
To change permanently:
In KDE, go to the Start menu, RedHat, System, Desktop Switching Tool.
In Gnome, go to Start menu, System, Desktop Switching Tool.
In both cases, it'll tell you you have to restart; doing a Logout is sufficient.
To switch back to MS Windows, or to NT, though, you have to reboot all the way and get System Commander or lilo or whatever boot manager to do the other thing. In Gnome, reboot is an option when you choose Logout on the Start menu. In KDE you actually have to log out and choose from the System menu on the login screen.
Step 1: Enable TCP/IP
Go to LinuxConf (foot menu, System -> LinuxConf). Config > Networking > Client Tasks > Basic Host Information, click on it. You will see your host name. OK.
Click on the tab for Adaptor 1. That's the only ethernet adapter you have, so just leave the others alone. Set your settings, most should be obvious, IP, netmask. Set the Net device to "eth0". The Kernel module should probably be eepro100 or whatever the default is. Be sure to click on Enabled.
[If you just have a small office with an ethernet, not connected to the internet, use netmasks of 255.0.0.0 and give each machine a unique address from 10.0.0.0 up through 10.255.255.255, except avoid 0's and 1's and 127's and 254's and 255's.]
Then reboot the system. I've had trouble if the Ethernet light isn't on as it boots - linux can crash on bootup, the console shows endless repetition of the same error message. Reboot again to fix it.
Test a: Pay attention to the light under the ethernet plug, UNDER it, on the right behind the backspace key, hard to see unless you lift up the laptop, or look along the top from the edge of the table. Also look at the light on the hub that you plugged the 10baseT cable into. Both lights indicate if the Ethernet hardware is working/enabled. You ain't going nowhere unless they are both on.
Test b: Get on another computer and ping your laptop. Get on a console in Linux and ping the other machine. In both linux and msdos, you type, for instance:
> ping 10.0.5.5
or whatever the IP address is. Each machine should be able to ping themselves (easy) but also the other machine. If you can't get pings across, go no further until you can. Try pinging an obviously nonexistent IP address to see what it looks like to call out into the dark.
Test c: On another computer, fire up Netscape or IE and try to websurf to the IP address of your VAIO. It should display a page telling you that you've successfully installed Apache. assuming that you asked for "web server" in install.
Cheap way to move files if you can't get anything else working: put them into your webserver's directory and download them using Netscape from the other machine. You should also have an FTP server running if you asked for that.
I had the machine making a high pitched whining, starting on bootup, and going off and on depending. Drawing on the screen seemed to make the sound come out. For instance, dragging a window would make it sing, and letting go would make the sound stop.
I finally tracked this down to the CPU speed. In the bios setup (push F2 while the sony/vaio bootup animation is going on), if you set the CPU speed to anything other than than Full or Auto, it'll make this annoying sound. Auto should save battery better; recommended.
As with other OS's, the trackpad comes up defaulting to being tap-sensitive. If you hit the surface hard enough with a finger, that counts as a click. You could probably learn to click and drag but I'm just not in the mood because it's not very robust.
It's a constant nuisance, as I tend to tap accidentally as I type, redirecting the text to a completely different part of the document, right in the middle of typing a word, about once a minute. There's workarounds, but it's still a pain. Sony and other manufacturers seem unsympathetic.
Fortunately, Bruce Kall made a program to turn it off, more information here.
ethernet:
http://www.tux.org/hypermail/linux-eepro100/1999-Jun/0041.html
http://www.tux.org/hypermail/linux-eepro100/1999-Jun/0044.html
linux1394 (i.Link/Firewire):
Your VAIO may or may not work. Read here and try out. I haven't yet.
http://linux1394.sourceforge.net/
this guy got it to talk to his Erikson cellphone over infrared, and got sound to work, and had a great jpeg that i ripped off: http://www.weitz.de/vaio.html
semi-useful: http://www.themoes.org/linux/vaio/
older Linuxes on older 505s:
http://home.rochester.rr.com/specht/505/index.html
http://www.joechiu.com/computing/vaio/linuxon505.html