Linux on a Sony Vaio VPCEG25FD(B) laptop

Index, feed.

The VPCEG25FD is a mid-range laptop, with a 2-core, 4-thread i5 CPU, a respectable amount of RAM and storage, and a HDMI output.

I installed Debian from a CD image written to a USB drive and current mirrors as of 2011-12-20 (Wheezy). The kernel version is 3.0.0-1-amd64. Everything I needed works well out of the box.

Tech specs: Intel Core i5 2430M at 2.4 GHz (see cpuinfo), 6 GB RAM, 14-inch LED-lit LCD with a native resolution of 1366x768 and an Intel HD 3000 graphics accelerator, 640 GB HDD (Toshiba), DVD writer, SD/MS reader, Bluetooth, 4 USB 2.0 ports, mini-jack analog audio I/O, webcam. See Sony's description, lspci -vvv.

Working

• Xorg and HDMI output: work out of the box (driver: i915). Use xrandr to put an external HD display on the right side of the built-in LCD:

  xrandr --verbose --output LVDS1 --mode 1366x768  --auto --pos 0x0
  xrandr --verbose --output HDMI1 --mode 1920x1080 --auto --pos 1366x0

CPU and graphics performance is more than enough to flawlessly play all YouTube 1080p videos I tried, using mplayer from debian-multimedia;

• Audio and HDMI audio: work out of the box. Use mplayer with option -ao alsa:device=hw=0.3 to force output to HDMI (as aplay -l reveals);

• Gigabit Ethernet: works out of the box (Atheros AR8151, driver: atl1c), and was detected during install;

• wireless: works out of the box (Atheros AR9285, driver: ath9k);

• SD card reader: works out of the box, tested with a 8GB Sandisk SDHC card (driver: rts_pstor), includes a LED that lights when the card is being accessed;

• DVD player: seems to work out of the box, read one video DVD with it;

• USB2.0: works (of course);

• webcam: works out of the box (tested with mplayer tv://);

• "Turbo Boost": works out of the box, but frequencies appear to be misreported in /proc/cpuinfo (where the cores appear to scale from 800 MHz to 2401 MHz): I used i7z to get the "real" frequencies, that reach 2942 MHz with one busy thread, and 2793 MHz with four;

• suspend to RAM: works using s2ram from package uswsusp;

• suspend to disk: works using s2disk from package uswsusp, with both suspend modes, video modes are correctly restored after wakeup;

Untested

• Memory Stick reader;

• SD reader with anything but SDHC (it is supposed to support plain old SD as well as SDXC);

• DVD writing;

• Bluetooth: untested but appears to be supported (I see a "bluetooth" module loaded);

• VGA output, but almost certainly works;

Special setup

Very little manual setup was needed.

• To make touchpad click work, I added partial Xorg configuration directives (a full xorg.conf apparently is not needed anymore) in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/synaptics.conf (I blindly pasted this from Somewhere on the Internet):

  Section "InputClass"
      Identifier      "Touchpad"                      # required
      MatchIsTouchpad "yes"                           # required
      Driver          "synaptics"                     # required
      Option          "MinSpeed"              "0.5"
      Option          "MaxSpeed"              "1.0"
      Option          "AccelFactor"           "0.075"
      Option          "TapButton1"            "1"
      Option          "TapButton2"            "2"     # multitouch
      Option          "TapButton3"            "3"     # multitouch
      Option          "VertTwoFingerScroll"   "1"     # multitouch
      Option          "HorizTwoFingerScroll"  "1"     # multitouch
      Option          "VertEdgeScroll"        "1"
      Option          "CoastingSpeed"         "8"
      Option          "CornerCoasting"        "1"
      Option          "CircularScrolling"     "1"
      Option          "CircScrollTrigger"     "7"
      Option          "EdgeMotionUseAlways"   "1"
      Option          "LBCornerButton"        "8"     # browser "back" btn
      Option          "RBCornerButton"        "9"     # browser "forward" btn
  EndSection

Relevant links

• Linux on Laptops;
• i7z on Google Code;
• Sony's catalog describing this laptop.

www.kurokatta.org

David Haguenauer <www@kurokatta.org>
$Id: linux-on-sony-vpceg25fd.malblog,v 1.16 2012/01/08 04:22:14 homer Exp $