HOWTO Sony VAIO PCG-XG9

Win98SE/RH6.2 Linux Dual Boot

By Jeffrey D. Carter - May 27, 2000 (Updated January 29, 2001)

Contents

Introduction
Disclaimer
Partitioning
Installation
DVD/CD-ROM
Modem		 Networking
IrDA
Sound
APM
USB
Links

Introduction

Some of the following information about the Sony VAIO PCG-XG9 probably also applies to the newer XG models, the XG13 and XG19.

The XG9 uses the same NeoMagic Magic Media 256AV 128 bit 2.5 meg video used on earlier PCG-F series, and the same Yamaha DS-XG sound used in the F430 and F450. The newer XG models appear to use the NeoMagic 256XL, and have a larger (14.1") LCD panel in addition to a faster processor.

See David Efflant's excellent write-up on the Sony VAIO F-series. I owe my easy success and the format of this document to his notes.

This model came standard with 128 meg RAM, 13.3" TFT 1024x768 display, DVD/CD, and removable floppy drive which can be replaced with a weight saver, optional second battery, 10GB removable hard drive, or CD-RW. It can be expanded up to 256 meg of RAM by replacing the 2 64MB modules with standard 128MB PC100 SDRAM modules. Unfortunately, since it comes with both slots full, at least one must be removed to expand it, so buy as much memory as you think you'll need up front.

A mini docking station is also available which you need to bring out some of the ports (serial/control-A1, S-Video, optical digital) that aren't on the main unit. The removable floppy drive can be attached to the notebook or the docking station via a provided cable that also brings out the parallel port. With this cable, it is possible to have both the DVD/CD (internal) and floppy (external) attached simultaneously. This is generally unnecessary, since the BIOS will boot from the DVD/CD. There are USB and FireWire (i.Link, IEEE 1394) ports on both the main unit and the docking station, though the documentation implies that both FireWire ports can't be used at the same time. There is an IrDA port on the back of the notebook. Win98 Device Manager shows 2 IrDA devices, but I'll be darned if I can find a second one.

When running Windows98, the unit seems to get a good honest 5+ hours out of 2 batteries, when doing word processing, web surfing and the like. I don't have any data yet when running Linux.

The standard hard drive on the XG9 is 18.1 GB split into 2 partitions of approximately 10 GB (C:) and 8 GB (D:) with the 2nd empty partition intended for multimedia storage. (Why they thought Win98 would need 10G is unknown).

Disclaimer

The author made every attempt to provide accurate information at time of writing, but there is no warranty expressed or implied that the information will be accurate for your equipment at time of installation. The Linux setup instructions in particular are not necessarily complete or in the proper order, since distributions may vary. It just provides notes about certain equipment or feature selections. You are urged to verify your equipment, software and documentation, backup any essential data, and have a tested bootable floppy containing everything you need to restore your system, before making any changes.

If installing RedHat Linux, pay particular attention to RedHat documentation about Server or Workgroup installation and disk partitioning. This may apply to other Linux distributions as well. Making the wrong selection may completely overwrite your current operating system or render it unbootable.

Repartitioning the drive

Initially, I tried to use FIPS 2.0 from the RedHat 6.2 CD to squeeze the C: partition, but it seemed confused by something about the FAT32 partition table. Rather than risk the partition table, I grabbed my copy of Partition Magic and moved things around. This is a fabulous program, with unfortunately fascist, unenforceable "licensing" terms. (With UCITA and DMCA they may actually be able to enforce these terms, so I'll probably never give them any more money. It's too bad, since they do seem to be Linux-friendly, and I don't usually mind riding the upgrade train for new features in software that works.)

I shrank C: (hda1) to about 3 GB, and put in a ~16MB /boot adjacent to it in hda3. I stretched the Windows extended partition (hda2) down to fill the rest of the new empty space, then expanded the D: partition (hda6) to about 10 GB for shared data space between Linux and Windows. I inserted a 2.5GB Linux ext2 partition for the Linux root. Partition Magic refused to create a Linux Swap partition bigger than 128MB, so I just left that for Disk Druid.

Installation

NOTE: The following may not be in the exact order, especially if using a different Linux distribution, but are notes about selections of certain options.

Put the RedHat 6.2 CD in the drive, power it on, and go. I selected the graphical install (in hindsight, I think I like text mode better).

It is usually best to select Custom setup and "I want to select all packages". Just be careful about backing up during the install. If you back up too far, almost all of the default and selected packages will be unselected, including major and essential packages. After you select all the packages you want, it will take under 15 minutes to install them from the CD.

The install went with only 1 minor glitch -- even though the graphical install worked fine on the LCD display, the X configuration step could not initialize the display correctly, even though it correctly identified it as the NeoMagic chipset. Even Generic VGA wouldn't work. I left it configured for the NeoMagic, and continued. I forgot to mark the Linux /boot as Active in Disk Druid, so I had to boot Win98 once in order to run fdisk.

Once booted in Linux, X wouldn't start. I booted single-user, and ran the text-mode Xconfigurator. It correctly identified the NeoMagic chipset and it worked from then on.

DVD/CD-ROM

The internal cdrom is recognized as a normal ide atapi /dev/hdc. This should be automatically be added to /etc/fstab during CD installation.

We all know the sorry story behind DVD. This and the FireWire/DV apps under Windows 98 are why I'll probably keep it as dual boot for a while.

Networking

I am currently using a Netwave Wireless Ethernet card, which coupled with the 6-hour battery life, means I can sit in the dining room, in front of the TV, or on the back porch, and work without wires.

For when I'm sitting at the desk, and need to transfer lots of data, I have now purchased a NetGear FA510C Cardbus Fast Ethernet card. UPS delivered, I plugged it in the docking station, powered up the XG9, and it worked. No fuss, no muss. The system correctly configures whichever card (wired or wireless) is plugged in, and sets it up.

The Linux Wireless Tools are useful for any wireless networking setup. The version (20) appropriate for RedHat 6.2 is available there or on sourceforge. I have taken the liberty of fixing the xwireless program contained in the wireless tools package. A patch is available here. This is an (apparently) Netwave-specific program that displays a signal quality bar on the X desktop.

The Linux drivers for this card are much better than Netwave's drivers for Win98 and Windows For Workgroups (I've also used this card on an older Winbook that went to computer heaven a week after I installed RedHat 6.0 on it last fall). The Windows drivers have a horrific memory leak, such that if I leave the machine idle for a day, it won't do anything, including shutdown. Also, the silly thing frequently doesn't initialize correctly on startup or un-suspend, and I have to eject the card and stick it back in 5 or 10 times before it starts. (Windows 98 provides no "restart card", only "stop card".) The Linux drivers work first time, every time.

Modem

The modem is identified in Win98 as "Rockwell HCF 56K Data Fax RTAD PCI Modem" apparently using io port 0x2f8. It's a controllerless losemodem. Nuf' said.

IrDA

I have not tried IrDA yet in Linux. Under Windows 98, I use it to sync my Palm IIIx, and am looking forward to getting this working with Kpilot. David Efflant reports success getting IrDA working on the F450, and this model seems to be the same.

Sound

Thanks to pointers to the ALSA project from Caleb Shay and Darryl Eaton, I now have the sound on this unit fully working. The sound support is the Yamaha DS-XG (YMF744) chipset, not the NeoMagic NM256AV, as is used on some of the other VAIOs.

Acquire the drivers, library, and utilities from the ALSA project. The drivers needs to be 0.5.10b or better (2001-01-23) for the Yamaha DS-XG support (the YMFPCI driver). Deconfigure all sound support in your kernel except for CONFIG_SOUND, which should be set for a loadable module. The instructions for building and installing kernels can be found in the usual places. It is not strictly necessary to delete all the "old" sound support, but it doesnt help having it around.

You then have to go through a 3-step install for ALSA, in the following order:

For each step, you issue the following commands: 

./configure
make
(as root) make install
Then, you have to provide the system with module configuration file. The sound portion of my /etc/modules.conf is here. This file includes compatibility with all the OSS device interfaces. Tack this on the end of your file, and make sure it contains no other "snd" or "sound" configs. Then, assuming you don't use DEVFS, you need to populate /dev. Run the snddevices script: 

(as root) ./snddevices
The only tricky part is that you need to un-mute the sound channels before they'll make any noise. There is a script provided that you can out into /etc/rc.d to automatically handle startup.

APM

These use the newer ACPI which works with apm -s, putting it into deep suspend, but not apm -S. But it wakes on any keypress, so the lack of standby is not really a problem other than not being able to do it automatically.

As far as hot keys, Fn-Esc (suspend) and Fn-F12 (hiberinate) both put it into deep suspend. Fn-D (display off) and Fn-S (idle standby) do not do anything.

Initially I had trouble with the system locking up when coming out of suspend, but found that the USB workaround suggested for earlier kernels was not necessary. I did have to set the PCMCIARESTART="yes" in the /etc/sysconfig/apmd configuration file.

I was playing with a suspend-to-swap space patch from Gabor Kuti available on his web site. It appears to work, though I can't seem to get the Magic Sysrq key sequences to work. Configuring it to override APM suspend makes the Fn-Esc key sequence suspend-to-disk rather than to RAM. I'd like to be able to do either, with different hot keys. This code appears to be sporadically maintained, and has not been updated for 2.4 kernels.

I tried out the ACPI4Linux code, but other than disabling APM, it doesn't actually do anything. It appears to correctly identify the ACPI capabilities, though, so there is hope.

USB

I started experimenting with the USB support when I bought a Fujufilm FinePix 4900Zoom digital camera. Initially, I used a 2.4.0-test9 kernel, that "seemed" to work ok, but it was a little flaky. The Linux-USB web page has lots of good info on setting up and using USB. With the 2.4.0 release plus the "USB hotplug patch", this is now rock-solid. (These fixes are supposedly rolled into 2.4.1, now hot off the presses). It uses the usb-storage module to treat the camera's flash media as a DOS hard drive.

In addition, I have now acquired a D-Link DSB-C300 USB video camera. This is an ov511-based camera, which is well-supported by Mark McClelland's ov511 driver as a Video4Linux grabber in the 2.4.0 kernel. So far, I have successfully used xawtv to look at myself, and ohphone to connect to a PolyCom video conferencing system and Microsoft NetMeeting 3.01. UCL VIC and qVIX are giving me a little more trouble, as I try to track down the lengthy lists of prerequisites.

Notes

Dave Efflant reports problems with using the blue Fn key for other functions. I found the contrast (Fn-F6), brightness (Fn-F5), and speaker volume (Fn-F4) function keys to be ineffective, but not dangerous. The Fn-F3 combination does toggle the speaker on and off.

I've been unable to perform live dock/undock operations. The system hangs when it comes out of suspend mode after undocking, and doesn't seem to notice the dock on insertion. This is an annoyance, since it means I have to halt the machine first. It may be possible to use the apmd features to do pre/post suspend scripts that disable and re-enable the hardware in the docking station (floppy, PC Card, USB ?) similarly to the PCMCIA restart.

Links

The following information helped me set up this notebook, and related information:

Linux Laptop Home Page
HOWTO Sony VAIO PCG-F450/F430 Linux
Linux Laptop Hardware
Linmodems
Sony Notebook Computers
Linux Wireless Tools
Open H.323 Project
Linux-USB

Send comments or additional information to jcarter@speakeasy.net

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