[ | Date | | | 2011-12-21 23:48 -0500 | ] |
[ | Mod. | | | 2012-01-07 23:21 -0500 | ] |
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.
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;
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;
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
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