sony-vaio-z-series team mailing list archive

[Glenn Moloney <glenn.moloney@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Bjorn,

Well - I managed to do a little more testing, but much still to test.

Battery life: this afternoon I got 5 hours use out of the battery on ubuntu
with the internal battery. I have not tried the sheet battery yet - cause I
just love how light this laptop is. Usage was document editing, web browsing
over wireless. Screen brightness at half setting - which was fine for indoor
use on a sunny day. Power management set to "Powersave". No other tweaking
of power settings though.

Fan is on at low speed setting most of the time during normal use, but is
very quiet. A big compilation or other cpu intensive activity makes the fan
much louder. When I am doing that kind of work I don't mind the noise, but
it is nice and quiet for browsing, editing, work processing, etc.

Unfortunately I have not had a chance to try the external radeon yet. I
would be surprised if it worked out of the box though!

And - one more update - bluetooth is working now. I have synced fine with a
sony bluetooth mouse and my phone, but having some connection problems with
my external sony bluetooth keyboard.

Cheers,
Gllenn.

On 22 August 2011 19:38, Bjorn Wesen <bjorn.wesen@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> [sorry for not replying to the thread directly - I didn't find any
> function in launchpad to do that...]
>
> Hi Glenn,
>
> as I'm considering a new Vaio Z too I'd just like to ask three short
> follow up questions since you seemed to have installed Ubuntu
> recently:
>
> - did you get any feeling for if the battery life is much worse with
> Ubuntu than Win7?
> - is the fan sound annoying? does the fan turn on even when idling?
> (this is important :)
> - did you try the external Radeon yet?
>
> Best regards,
> /Bjorn
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Hi All,
>
> Also new here. At the weekend I installed vanilla ubuntu natty on my
> vaio vpc217gg. Almost everything works straight up - as demonstrated
> with Live CD.
>
> I have not yet tried any additional scripts or newer versions of the
> sony-laptop module or any other special tweaks.
>
> There is one important gotcha - partitioning - see below.
>
> What works:
>
> Intel graphics works fine. Full HD.
> Audio including microphone ok.
> Brightness controls work fine.
> Suspend and hibernate work.
> Bluetooth won't turn on. Needs investigation.
> Existing ssd raid0 detected and working fine. Dual boot with existing
> windows 7 installation.
> Battery life very good.
> Touchpad works.
> wireless and wired ethernet ok.
> external media dock is detected and radeon graphics. Ubuntu installs
> driver - but i haven't had time to test it yet. Still using intel
> graphics.
>
> The glitch is that using the graphical or alternate install....
>      - the original partition table is restored after rebooting after
> installation completes.
> That means you are presented with a "grub rescue" prompt and are
> unable to boot the system.
>
> At that point, the Win7 filesystem has been shrunk, but it now sits in
> a partition that is too big for it. I
>  - rebooted from the install CD, and followed the install (including
> activatiing the ssd raid),
>  - drop out to a shell when the installer is ready to partition the disk.
>  - Used "resizentfs -i" to work out the size of the Win7 filesystem,
>  - Use "fdisk /dev/dm-0" to delete the Win7 partition and recreate it
> to just accommodate the size of the Win7 filesystem with a little
> safety margin
>  - Use fdisk to create a new linux and swap partition in the left over
> space.
>  - Reboot - just to be sure the partition table is saved this time....
>  - Follow installer again up to the point of partitioning the disk -
> and YES, the new partition table is saved.
>  - Select the new, empty partitions for installing linux - for a
> second time. luckily it is very fast on this laptop :-).
>  - Reboot when doen - all good. I can now dual boot into Windows or Linux.
>
> If you are prepared in advance - what may work for you is to take
> precautionary action during the initial install:
>  - Use alternate install disk (though graphical might work OK too).
>  - Shrink the Win7 partition during installation and partition the
> disk as normal
>  - Drop out to a shell before proceeding with install (Alt-F2)
>  - fdisk /dev/dm-0
>  - Type "u" and "c" as recommended so that you can see partition
> layout in blocks.
>  - Use the "p" command and record the exact layout of the partition
> table (just in case!!!!!)
>  - Use "w" command to force the partition table write.
>
> If you are feeling lucky, proceed with the install, or reboot into the
> live cd and check the partition table has been saved. If it hasn't,
> recreate the exact layout you recorded above manually with fdisk and
> reboot again. Then proceed with the install.
>
> Oh - and did I mention - this is an awesome laptop - and even better
> with linux onboard :-).
>
> Cheers,
> Glenn.
>