Sony VAIO PCG-FX340 and RedHat Linux 7.3

I bought this laptop off ebay in September, 2002.

Some specifications:

You can also read the 'official' specs page from Sony.

I installed RedHat 7.3 on this machine in less than 2 hours, including the time it took to check the hard drive for bad blocks.

The installation procedure automatically passed hdc=ide-scsi parameter to the kernel. I left it and it worked fine.

Before beginning, I made some BIOS changes. I had to get the user's manual to figure out how to get into the BIOS (press F2 while the splash screen is playing). It's equipped with PhoenixBIOS, which I consider kind of lame. I turned off Plug-and-Play OS, set the 32-bit IO on both the hard drive and DVD, and turned off the stupid Sony splash screen.

Since this was the 1st time I had installed RedHat 7.3, I didn't realize that you really should allocate at least 3GB to the /usr partition (I allocated only 2GB - insert sound of hand smacking forehead here). Consequently, after I finished the installation and updates, I barely had enough room to install Quake. It left me with about 6% of the /usr partition free.

After installation, I removed nautilus since it uses an awful lot of RAM. After removing it, RAM usage dropped from about 122kb to 79kb.

There was an updated kernel available. After installing it, but before running lilo -v -v, I added append="idebus=66" to the stanza for the new kernel (with the scsi parameter mentioned above, the line actually reads append="hdc=ide-scsi idebus=66"). Without this, it assumes 33MHz for the IDE bus speed. After running lilo -v -v and rebooting, everything was working fine.

hdparm

To speed up things some, I fiddled with the hdparm settings (there's a nice little tutorial on hdparm available here).

To begin with, I edited /etc/sysconfig/harddisks and set USE_DMA=1, MULTIPLE_IO=16, and EIDE_32BIT=3. After rebooting to make sure it would work, everything was kosher.

I then copied the original /etc/sysconfig/harddisks file (before the changes above were applied) to /etc/sysconfig/harddiskhdc and set USE_DMA=1. This got rid of the choppiness I saw when watching DVD's.

Networking

Ethernet

The PCG-FX340 is equipped with an integrated Intel i82562 Pro/100 Ethernet board. I have found its performace to be flaky. For some reason, it stops working periodically, and I have to restart networking to get it functioning again. I set up a cron job to ping another computer on my network every hour, and if it doesn't work, it restarts networking automatically. Kind of a crude hack, but I still need my 3Com pcmcia network card for my other laptop right now as it's my CVS server. Maybe sometime soon I'll have some time to figure out why it shits the bed so frequently.

Follow-up: Ok, I think I figured out what's wrong. This message kept showing up in /var/log/messages:


eepro100: wait_for_cmd_done timeout!
After doing a google search on this, I came across this message which recommended downloading the the official Intel driver and installing it. I tried this, and the problem persisted. Going back to the google search, I found this message, which recommended going here, getting the eepro100-diag.c source, compiling it, and running it to see if the PCI sleep mode is enabled. Here's the steps i used (as root):

gcc -O eepro100-diag.c -o eepro100-diag
eepro100-diag -f -ee
Look at the output, it will warn you if sleep mode is enabled (mine was). If it is, turn it off with

eepro100-diag -G 0 -w -w -f
Then, I did a cold boot and ran

eepro100-diag -f -ee
again to verify it was not in sleep mode. It wasn't, and everything seems to be running just fine now.

Modem

There's an integrated Winmodem in this VAIO, and it's possible there's a driver for it available here. However, I had a pcmcia modem that works just fine so I decided not to mess with the Winmodem at all. I'm using a generic 56K Fax Modem (X2) (CIRRUS LOGIC CL-MD56xx/CD04.08 - 603D PCMCIA (V.90-ONLY) SPEAKERPHONE 04) which kudzu recognized and configured automatically. No big shock there, since RH6.2 did the same.

Follow-up: ppp connections were working fine, but I noticed the following error message in /var/log/messages:


modprobe: modprobe: Can't locate module ppp-compress-21
This time, I did a search on RedHat and found this message which recommends adding the following lines to /etc/modules.conf:

# Alias ppp compression routines
alias net-pf-4 off
alias net-pf-5 off
alias ppp-compress-21 bsd_comp
alias ppp-compress-26 ppp_deflate
alias ppp-compress-24 ppp_deflate
However, the bsd_comp.o module is nowhere to be found on my system. And, I have been unable to find a solution for locating and/or installing it. When I have more time, I will investigate this further and post the solution.

2nd Follow-up: the bsd_comp.o module was removed from the kernel. Therefore, the correct thing to do is shut it off as such:


alias ppp-compress-21 off
However, problems persisted with the modem connection. I was unable to upload large amounts of data. For what seemed to be no reason at all, both uploads and downloads would cease. After spending time going over everything else I thought it could be (the wire, the wall jack, hardware settings, etc) I decided to get a better modem. I bid on and won a 3CXM756 PCMCIA modem on ebay for $22.50. After I installed it, kudzu recognized and configured it, and I have not had a single problem since. What's the lesson here? Invest in a good modem!

XFree86

No problems configuring this for 1072x768 resolution at 24-bit color depth during the initial install.

DVD player

DVD player worked great right out of the box. I installed the Ogle DVD player and, after creating a symbolic link /dev/dvd to point to /dev/scd0 and editing /etc/fstab to point to /dev/dvd instead of /dev/cdrom, it worked like a charm. The first movie I watched was The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

CD-RW

I installed xcdroast and it worked ok. I had to type xhost +localhost to get the xcdroast software to (initially) work.

Follow-up: I have burned quite a few CDs now, and here's the settings I've found to work best and produce no errors:

CD writer speed:  18x
CD write FIFO buffer speed:  16MB
Audio read speed:  40x
Sectors for overlap sampling: 0
Sectorburst:  150

USB interface

As I don't have any USB devices to test this with, I haven't fiddled with it. The module loaded ok, though.

Follow-up: I don't think the USB interface on this particular laptop will work. I recently tried to use it with a Lexar Flash Card Reader and a Nikon Coolpix 990, and in both cases this is what appeared in dmesg after plugging them in:

hub.c: USB new device connect on bus1/1, assigned device number 2
usb_control/bulk_msg: timeout
usb.c: USB device not accepting new address=2 (error=-110)

From what I have gathered in doing some preliminary research, this is a low-level USB error and is generated when the USB_REQ_SET_ADDRESS command fails in the underlying usb hub code. That means it's not even making it to the device driver (thanks to Jimmie Mayfield for this information). Bummer. I've posted a question about it on the Valhalla list, so if I find anything out I'll report it back here.

2nd Follow-up: I was able to get the USB interface to work, but it involved patching and rebuilding the kernel. Read all about what I did here.

i-Link interface

I don't have any IEEE1394 devices, so I can't really test this either. The module loaded ok, though.

Sound Support

Worked fine without any tweaking or modifications.

Conclusion

Overall, I'm pleased with the performance of this laptop. It was a little frustrating getting the USB interface to work, but all's well that ends well. The LCD screen is very clear and DVD's look great. The battery lasts about 90 minutes on a full charge. One thing I have noticed is the power supply gets very, very hot during use. Don't put it near anything that melts easily. It cooked 2 of my daughter's crayons in about 3 minutes, much to her dismay.

Follow-up: After about 6 months of constant use, the power supply started shutting down intermittently. It would occur anywhere between 5 minutes and 2 hours of use. At this point it was so hot i couldn't even touch it. For about 2 days i was able to keep it working by wrapping it in a damp cloth and blowing air across it with a fan. However, after the 2 days it wouldn't even stay on to complete a normal boot-up sequence. Using ebay I bid on and won a 5-amp power supply that is meant for the Vaio GRV and GRZ series (the old one that burned up supplied only 3-amps). It runs much cooler and has been working without a problem.

Feel free to contact me if you have any comments/questions.


Copyright © 2002 by Peace Computer Systems