Linux on a Sony Vaio PCG-Z600HEK

Reposting this here, as it is was one of the pages in danger of being lost on my old demon webspace.

This is my (now rather old) write-up of installing Linux on one of the older Sony laptops at work. As I managed to install using the PCMCIA CD-ROM, and get the sound, pcmcia, floppy & software modem working, it may be of interest to someone. Food for TuxMobil & Google at least.

I don't have exact specs for the machine, as I wasn't involved in its
purchase and was just given it to use, no manuals etc. I only know the model
number from the sticker on the bottom :-).

Hardware

This model features an Intel PIII 800MHz, 256k cache and 256megs of
RAM. The screen is ~12inch and does 1024x768, driven by an ATI
Rage Mobility chipset. The hard drive in mine is a 20gig Toshiba MK2016GAP.
The unit has built in ethernet supplied by an eepro100, standard Intel
chipsets providing IDE and USB. lspci:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX - 82443BX/ZX Host bridge (rev 03)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 440BX/ZX - 82443BX/ZX AGP bridge (rev 03)
00:07.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB PIIX4 ISA (rev 02)
00:07.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82371AB PIIX4 IDE (rev 01)
00:07.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82371AB PIIX4 USB (rev 01)
00:07.3 Bridge: Intel Corporation 82371AB PIIX4 ACPI (rev 03)
00:08.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Sony Corporation CXD3222 iLINK Controller (rev
02)00:09.0 Multimedia audio controller: Yamaha Corporation YMF-744B [DS-1S Audio Controller] (rev 02)
00:0a.0 Communication controller: CONEXANT: Unknown device 2443 (rev 01)
00:0b.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82557 [Ethernet Pro 100] (rev
08)00:0c.0 CardBus bridge: Ricoh Co Ltd RL5c475 (rev 80)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc 3D Rage P/M Mobility AGP 2x (rev 64)

The laptop has no built-in floppy drive or CD-ROM; an external USB floppy
is provided instead, and an external CD-ROM which connects via a PCMCIA
card.

Installation

I have tried installing various distributions on here.

Redhat 7.3 went on very smoothly, and presumably so will newer versions.
It boots from the PCMCIA CD-ROM drive, and reads from it once booted with no
problems.

Mandrake 9.1 hung after booting.

Debian can be installed, but it takes a little more work. Specify this
kernel parameter "ide2=0x180,0x386" so that it can read from the
PCMCIA CD-ROM drive (as /dev/hde) once it is booted.

Configuration

Ethernet

The eepro100 driver in 2.2.x and 2.4.x worked for me, others I haven't
tried.

Touchpad

No idea, a colleague with a grudge against touchpads disabled the one on
mine using the machine's driver disk. Apparently it works just like a PS/2
mouse though.

Video

Using XFree86 3.3.6, I installed the Mach64 server, chose a high
frequency SVGA monitor setting and faked some refresh rates, and it
worked fine. Did I mention I know nothing about laptops?

It works fine with the XFree86 v4.1 ATI driver as well.

fbcon works using the vgacon driver, although the boot logo colours get
messed up when at the end of the kernel startup. The vesafb driver also
works, and with vga=791 gives a very nice text resolution. The
mach64 framebuffer driver did not work straight off, the machine didn't
crash, but nothing on the screen except a few lines criss-crossing. I didn't
need fbcon for anything so I did not investigate further.

USB

There's a single USB port on the side of the machine. It works fine
loading the usb-uhci driver.

If you plug in a USB mouse, you should only need to load the
hid and mousedev modules, and set up gpm or X to
read from /dev/input/mice with input type PS2.

Floppy Drive

The USB floppy drive works fine with the USB Mass Storage Devices
(usb-storage) module (note: this option in the kernel
config is dependent on SCSI support, which took me a while to figure out).

Once you have usb-storage loaded, the device will be
automatically detected when it is inserted. It will be assigned a SCSI disk
device; it seems to show up as /dev/sdb on my machine. Edit your
/etc/fstab line for the floppy drive to point to
/dev/sdb; it should look something like this:

/dev/sdb /floppy auto defaults,user,noauto 0 0

PCMCIA

The single socket on this laptop worked once I loaded the
yenta_socket and ds kernel modules. With the
pcmcia-cs package auto-loading of drivers for PCMCIA cards and
setup of devices worked nicely.

On Debian I use the following in /etc/defaults/pcmcia:

PCMCIA='yes'

PCIC=yenta_socket
PCIC_OPTS=""
CORE_OPTS='unreset_limit=400'
CARDMGR_OPTS="-d"

(The unreset_limit I added to work around timeouts waiting
the the CD-ROM to spin up.)


CDROM

The CDROM supplied with the laptop connects via a PCMCIA card, so you need
the PCMCIA drivers and software above and the ide-cs module for
the CD itself. It will show up as /dev/hde, unless you have an
unusual setup; link it to /dev/cdrom.

APM

APM is disabled in the BIOS on mine (maybe win2k didn't like it, don't
know), and I use apm=on to enable it for Linux. Alternatively
you can load apm as a module. Battery status reads out OK.
Suspend with "apm -s" works. And it automatically powers down on shutdown
once apm is loaded/enabled.

Sound

The ymfpci driver supports the built in chipset.

Modem

Unlike some laptops in the Vaio range which come with PCMCIA
modems, the Z600HEK has a built in modem. It is a software modem (with a
Conexant chipset), so you will need a special driver, which can be obtained
from http://www.mbsi.ca/cnxtlindrv/hsf/.
Binary/RPM drivers are available. I went for the source .tar.gz, which
contains the source to a number of kernel modules which make up the driver,
and some utilities, primarily hsfconfig which compiles and installs the
modules for the running kernel, and adds the /dev/ttySHS0 device
with which the modem is accessed.