sony-vaio-z-series team mailing list archive

[Sohrab Naushad <sohrab.naushad@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi guys,
First of all I'd like to thank all the people who put the time and effort
into writing these scripts to make our machines more compatible with linux.
Just a little info about me and my system. I've been using ubuntu for
roughly about a year and love every bit of it. Started with 10.10 and have
been on 11.04 for quite some time. I purchased this laptop in july, 2009 so
it might be older than some of the new systems you people might have.
Because almost everything worked out of the box with ubuntu and my relative
lack of knowledge in customizing and optimizing my system I didn't do much
to get everything functional. The only thing that did not work was the
Nvidia graphics card. Everything else e.g FN keys, memory card readers,
brightness control, mic worked right out of the box for me. As of late i've
been learning more about ubuntu and wish to make my system even greater.
Before I stumbled upon this page, I tried the vgaswitcheroo mechanism to
switch between graphics cards. The switching didn't work but I did find out
that with the stock install both of my cards are powered on even when only
the intel card is being used for unity. I installed powertop and saw that it
was sucking alot of juice. So I disabled the nvidia card by using the
vgaswitcheroo mechanism. The way i did this was:

1) In the kernel parameters, I set *modeset=1*
2) In the */etc/rc.local* I set *echo IGD >
/sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch* and *echo OFF > **>
/sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch.*

This effectively turned off the nvidia card and with some more power
customizations like black listing bluetooth and the pcmcia I got about 3.5
hours of battery life at 10 W/h from my battery which is 70.7% health at the
moment. After this I wanted to fix my nvidia card so I could use hardware
acceleration for youtube etc which is now using HTML 5.

The first time I ran this script, i was using the 3.0.3 Linux kernel from
the mainline ubuntu ppa. I still had the vgaswitcheroo mechanism running and
that broke my system. I had a very hard time recovering my data via live CD
from an encrypted home folder. I re-installed ubuntu with the stock kernel
and tried again. Everything went well although I did not understand the
instructions on the global-social so well. After rebooting I could get the
speed light to show up, but when I logged on Unity was on not by default. I
went into additional hardware drivers to see 3 new nvidia drivers which were
not activated. I activated one of those and rebooted. This time not being
able to load into graphical user interface. It kept giving me an error that
the kernel module was nvidia 280 and the driver installed was 270. I tried
to run the script numerous times in stamina and while having removed
!windows 2006 from the kernel parameters but the driver would not get
installed.

Now this is the third time i've installed ubuntu 11.04. And just before I
try this process again I want to make sure im doing it right. Oh, and all of
sudden the script is no longer downloading from the website. Is the server
down? Can I get it from somewhere else? This is the msg I get.

soh@soh-VGN-Z620N:~$ *sudo wget -NP /usr/local/bin/
http://global-social.net/files/sony-VGN-Zseries-janitor
[sudo] password for soh:
--2011-09-18 08:57:37--
http://global-social.net/files/sony-VGN-Zseries-janitor
Resolving global-social.net... 87.178.58.71
Connecting to global-social.net|87.178.58.71|:80... failed: Connection
refused.*

Alright, so once I get the script. This is what I plan to do please make
corrections if im going wrong somewhere. First my system info:
*
Linux soh-VGN-Z620N 2.6.38-11-generic #48-Ubuntu SMP Fri Jul 29 19:02:55 UTC
2011 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux*

1) I add *"acpi_osi=\\\"!Windows 2006\\\"* to grub. One question here. In
grub there are two lines *GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=* and*
**GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=*does it make a difference which line I put it
in?
    From what I understand in this step by adding this to grub with the back
slash's this kernel entry is inactivated unless we go into kernel boot
parameters at boot and remove the \ back slashs, and what this command does
is asks the acpi not to uninitilize at next reboot so that the card can
remain active or something like that.

2) Download and run the script. Allow it to do its stuff. Let it download
the newest drivers from the ftp server.

3) After everything is installed according to the sony vaio z wiki, i put
this script in the *rc.local*.

  #!/bin/sh

*lspci | grep "00:02.1" *

*if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then *

   - *cp /etc/X11/xorg.INTEL /etc/X11/xorg.conf ln -sf
   /usr/lib/libGL.so.INTEL /usr/lib/libGL.so.1 ln -sf
   /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libglx.so.INTEL
   /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libglx.so *

*else *

   - *cp /etc/X11/xorg.NVIDIA /etc/X11/xorg.conf ln -sf
   /usr/lib/libGL.so.185.18.08 /usr/lib/libGL.so.1 ln -sf
   /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libglx.so.185.18.08
   /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libglx.so *

*fi *

4) Open nvidia settings, save a configuration. And put the path into /
etc/default/switch-x-to

5) Reboot. In the kernel parameters remove backslashs. Itll boot into
stamina, then reboot again and itll boot into speed?

6) Hopefully everything will work this time?

Sorry for this being so long. I read the instructions many many times and im
a noob so I cant trouble shoot this alone. Ill be very grateful to anyone
who can help me out. Thanks

Sohrab Naushad