sony-vaio-z-series team mailing list archive

[Sébastien Roy <roys@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 2010-10-25 03:08, r1k0 wrote:
> Hi List,
> 
> I recently took possession of a vaio vpcz13m9e and I was wondering if I
> could hope succeeding in having the nvidia/intel GPUs to work using the
> feedback from this ML because I see people have vpcz11 and 12 mostly and
> googling around shows very few (if not none) linux users having this
> device (vpcz13).
> I use Gentoo and I got the system up and running using vesa so far.

I own a VPCZ1390S (canadian model).

It seems impossible to solve the gpu switching problem. First, the
firmware (version R3030C3 in my case) can't be patched to make the
"advancde menu" appear. The EFI booting trick (see
http://feature-enable.blogspot.com/2009/07/enable-vt-on-insydeh2o-based-sony-vaio.html
) does not work at all.

As far as the other trick (acpi_osi="!Windows 2006"), it does not seem
to work at all either. It seems the VPCZ13* are not intended to run
vista, so the bios probably does not care about "vista frienfly" gpu
switching.

Basically, I am out of options now for gpu switching.

For a basic install, all is well (at least better than vesa):
- Use the 10.10 installer
- on the first reboot, modify the grub lines so that
	- linux -> linux16
	- initrd -> inird16
	- quiet splash -> i8042.reset i8024.nomux i8024.noloop i8042.nopnp
- after first boot, update the /etc/default/grub and
/etc/grub.d/10_linux (and then update-grub) to make the previous grub
changes permanent.
- Install the latest sony-laptop-zseries from
http://www.logic.at/people/preining/software/

Intel graphics work fine, including 3D acceleration. If only I could
switch off the nvidia card to save power. I did not succeed there.

If anyone manage to get access to the nvidia card on these machines, I'm
very interested... :-)

Cheers,
Sebastien