sony-vaio-z-series team mailing list archive

[Zheng Wang <wangzhenglib@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I owned a z133gx. I delete the raid use 2 64G disk seperately and take out
the optical drive put a hard disk bay with 256G Samsung Pro SSD into it. (I
also ordered some transparent skin on ebay, works great. If you are
interested in exchanging some ideas about accessories let me know.)
Recently I decided to put a Linux on it. I have to say it's really a pain
comparing to thinkpad:

1. Os selection from most stable to less stable on my list are: CentOs 7,
Ubuntu LTS/Mint, Arch or Gentoo.

1.1 CentOs 7: Gnome is ugly(if I don't care the style I won't buy a Z), KDE
is nice. However I'm keeping getting a msg like intel_wait_for_pipe_off
from kernel and find software on centos is not easy. I cannot even install
conky from yum. I prefer to keep an eye on the status of the machine. Conky
is a must for me. For that reason I use rain meter under windows. However
it's another story... As a result I gave up on centos.

1.2 Arch I don't use it for a long time. A quick way to install it uses a
derivative distro like ArchBang. My experiences with software update is
each time I update, something will be broken. As Vaio Z is a tricky
machine, I perhaps don't want that unstability (Please correct me if I'm
wrong).

1.3 Only Ubuntu Family left. I can't install the 14.04 LTS, because the
machine freezes after getting into gnome. And Mint 13 cannot install the
bootloader(errrr...).

So I end up with Ubuntu 12.04.

As you all know there's lots of post installation work:

2. SSD optimization
I put things like noatime,nodiratime,discard,commit=xxx for ssd and create
more tmpfs partitions. Other things like swappiness and elevator you could
easily find by googling. Another strange thing I rarely see anybody
mentioned on vaio z wiki or anywhere online is the reboot problem. I'm
using kernel 3.11. I could shutdown, but not reboot. Each time I reboot, my
z hangs. (Do you guys have the similar issue?) I'm solving it by adding
kernel parameter reboot=triple.

3. Video Cards
It's quite straight forward with bumblebee. The only thing I think is to
install the intel driver first. It's wired it's not installed by default. I
just add the glensan repo and do a apt-get. After reboot, you will find the
touchpad stop working. There's an article on wiki telling you how to solve
it(Thanks again)

4. I installed tlp did some tweak. It works fine. My power consumption is
around 11Watt. I assume it's per hour. I saw some article saying it's per
second(???) it doesn't make sense at all. Let's assume it's per hour for
now. It means my standard 4400mah battery will give me around 4 hours.(Now
you see if it's per second. It means the battery will only give me 4
seconds!). Not bad but not ideal I'm considering buying an extended battery
like 7200mah.

5. Fingerprints work with fingerprint gui not fprint. fingerprint gui is
very nice software. But the gui needs some improvements. I'm considering
hiding the gui for now.

The last thing on my todo list is the sony z dkms. I'm wondering what's the
difference between sony laptop module and sony laptop z module? Is it
suitable for the current kernel 3.11 and 3.13?

Another thing I noticed is that after using 3.13, my shutdown and reboot
become slower.

Thanks for reading, all comments and ideas are welcome. Too bad there's no
sony vaio any more, let's keep Z alive!