Sony Vaio FE-690 (FE Series) and Gentoo Linux

by KC Link (www, email)


NOTE: Unfortunetly I had to return this laptop, because the university I am attending is requiring all engineering students to have a tablet PC -- so there will be no further updates to this page.

This page describes the current status of my installation of Gentoo Linux on my new Sony Vaio FE 690.

Overview of the Sony Vaio FE 690

The Sony Vaio FE is a great laptop. The design is awesome and it looks very sleek. It is a significant upgrade from the FE 590 model sporting the nvidia 7600 Go Graphics Card, up to 2GB of DDR2 RAM, goodies of software, and of course the Intel Centrino Duo. There shouldn't be to much difference linux support wise between the FE590, but that doesn't matter as I couldn't really find any docs on the 590 anyways. I think that the new Sony Vaio SZ model is also very similar to my machine, except for the screen size.

It runs cool and is very quiet. It gets a little warmer and noisier when you switch to Speed mode.. The screen is great, and the 1200x800 resolution is comfortable for most tasks. The battery life of this Sony Vaio FE690 is about 4 hours on Stamina mode. It's about 40 minutes less when you switch to Speed mode. I personally use the Stamina mode most of the time. I use the Speed mode mostly when I reboot under Windows XP and what to play a game or two. Of course I am plugged in most of the time.

Here's the output of lspci:
0:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS/940GML and 945GT Express PCI Express Root Port (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 02)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 02)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e2)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) IDE Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) Serial ATA Storage Controller IDE (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation G70 [GeForce Go 7600] (rev a1)
06:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (rev 02)
0a:03.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCIxx12 Cardbus Controller
0a:03.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments Unknown device 803a
0a:03.2 Mass storage controller: Texas Instruments 5-in-1 Multimedia Card Reader (SD/MMC/MS/MS PRO/xD)
0a:08.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation Intel(R) PRO/100 VE Network Connection (rev 02)

Video

I have no idea how the Intel chipset is working on linux as I only have the Nvidia one. My apologies.

I had a hell of a time getting X to work. It might've been just me, but I couldn't get gentoos nivida-glx and nvidia-kernel to work properly. Actually those installed just fine, I couldnt get the xorg.conf figured out. So I downloaded the latest NVIDIA drivers ran 'nvidia-xconfig'. The xorg.conf it built was perfect, you might need some touchpad entries though.. see below. The nvidia chipset works very well with the new Nvidia drivers 1.0-8756. I have yet to test Xgl+Compiz (as im still installing kde)

Ethernet

Worked out of the box. One strange thing though was during the gentoo install the ethernet device was eth1, and after installation it was eth0.

Wireless

Not working yet.
The wifi card wasn't working at first, but I found the drivers online. They are still development drivers but they seem perfectly stable to me. Intel has released a stable version of the drivers based off of an earlier release. The driver and instructions to install it can be found there: http://ipw3945.sourceforge.net/ I have not installed them yet.

Sound

Not working yet.
I had ready many bad things about the sound card. Apaprently It seems like it's recognized, It can even play sounds without errors. But no sound comes out of the damn speakers. That's my main concern so far.

The sound and mic now work perfectly thanks to a patch delivered by the alsa team. For more information about how to apply this patch, please read this.

Touchpad

To get the touchpad to work in X11 I had to set psmouse and evdev in the kernel as Modules. Then modprobe them upon boot, and finally emerge synaptics. There is a synaptic driver website with full support for the synaptic touchpad. The touchpad works with scrolling, corner tapping, etc.
Here is my Synaptics section in xorg.conf.
I use the bottom right corner as the right click and the top right corner as the middle click
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "AlwaysCore"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/event0"
Option "Protocol" "event"
Option "LeftEdge" "120"
Option "RightEdge" "930"
Option "TopEdge" "120"
Option "BottomEdge" "700"
Option "FingerLow" "14"
Option "FingerHigh" "15"
Option "MaxTapTime" "180"
Option "MaxTapMove" "110"
Option "ClickTime" "0"
Option "EmulateMidButtonTime" "75"
Option "VertScrollDelta" "10"
Option "HorizScrollDelta" "0"
Option "MinSpeed" "0.45"
Option "MaxSpeed" "0.75"
Option "AccelFactor" "0.020"
Option "EdgeMotionMinSpeed" "200"
Option "EdgeMotionMaxSpeed" "200"
Option "UpDownScrolling" "1"
Option "CircularScrolling" "0"
Option "CircScrollDelta" "0.1"
Option "CircScrollTrigger" "2"
Option "RTCornerButton" "2"
Option "RBCornerButton" "3"
Option "TapButton2" "2"
Option "SHMConfig" "true"
EndSection

ACPI

As far as the ACPI goes, it seems like it works but that the video card goes crazy when you come back from the suspend mode. I HIGHLY suspect the default nvidia driver to cause this.

Dual Core

The dual core is recognized, as well as the frequency scaling feature. Be sure to use a -686 ubuntu kernel package to have SMP enabled and see the 2 cores. 

processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model           : 14
model name      : Genuine Intel(R) CPU           T2600  @ 2.16GHz
stepping        : 8
cpu MHz         : 2161.577
cache size      : 2048 KB
physical id     : 0
siblings        : 2
core id         : 0
cpu cores       : 2
fdiv_bug        : no
hlt_bug         : no
f00f_bug        : no
coma_bug        : no
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 10
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat clflush dts acpi 
		  mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx constant_tsc pni monitor vmx est tm2 xtpr
bogomips        : 4334.92

processor       : 1
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model           : 14
model name      : Genuine Intel(R) CPU           T2600  @ 2.16GHz
stepping        : 8
cpu MHz         : 2161.577
cache size      : 2048 KB
physical id     : 0
siblings        : 2
core id         : 1
cpu cores       : 2
fdiv_bug        : no
hlt_bug         : no
f00f_bug        : no
coma_bug        : no
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 10
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat clflush dts acpi 
		  mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx constant_tsc pni monitor vmx est tm2 xtpr
bogomips        : 4322.82

Fn Keys

Not Tested
I've found a href="https://launchpad.net/bugs/35319">this link concerning the Fn keys. I've yet to research it in depth.

Brightness

As far as the brightness goes, it doesn't seem to work yet on the nvidia chipset.

Camera

Not Tested
Not recognized out of the box. Haven't tried to install it yet.

Bluetooth

Not Tested
Recognized but I didn't have any application to try. It seems like Linux recognizes it though so it should work.

Memory card reader

Works out of the box.

Conclusion

So the bottom line is that my Sony Vaio FE-690 is far from being completely supported by Linux, but I expect the situation to improve in the near future. I'm still very happy with my purchase, this laptop rocks, and it will rock even more soon :)

Hope it helped!

Feel free to send me an email if you have any question.

KC
www.binaryelysium.com
For the specifications of the Sony Vaio FE, please go to Sony's website.


Last update: 06/11/06