My install of Linux-Mandrake on a Sony Vaio PCG-748

I decided to do the Linux thing on my laptop finally. I was just spending too much time working on a windows machine, when there was so much nerdy computing to be done on a real Unix machine! Here's the score:

I have a Sony Vaio PCG-748. That model is a Pentium 266, standard with 32 megs of RAM (I put in another 32), MagicGraph Mh 2160 video card, a built in NON-winmodem, LCD 13.1" screen, etc.

I bought this machine in December, 1998. It was already old by then, but it worked for what I needed. Immediately, I began to research putting Linux on it, but there were reports that the removeable hard drive might cause problems (during my install, there were no such problems) and concern over the modem (Sony began to put winmodems in some machines, to the chagrin of the Linux crowd), and problems with bootable CD Roms (as my model has removeable CD ROM or floppy, but to use both you need a special parallel port adapter). Since I couldn't use them both at the same time, I had to have a CD that was bootable. That wasn't a problem. Most now come that way.

By October 1999, I decided to just do it, results be damned. I am glad I did.

There were no major install problems with my Linux-Mandrake 6.1 setup. The copy of L-M I bought included PartitionMagic, which was a life saver. I did the requisite defrag and scandisk and booted into the floppy with fips, etc on it (see install info in your distribution for more details). Fips wouldn't/couldn't resize my partition. I was trying to shrink my 4 gig HD to 2.3 Windows, 1.7 Linux. Nope, won't work. So, I dug out PartitionMagic (it's on disk #3, buried in some subdirectory under PMagic). I installed it, started it, it rebooted my machine into DOS and asked a couple of very easy questions about how much I wanted to shrink the Fat 32 (Windows) partition. I gave it the information, and it took about 20 minutes to reclaim that space.

Note that PMagic doesn't work well under Windows NT. This is a problem if for some reason you are running NT on your Vaio. I don't see that as a common configuration, but I hope that might help you out, if you are running NT. It's not really PMagic that's the trouble, but more the fact that it needs to write a floppy disk to install (instead of just booting to DOS mode, which NT doesn't have). When prompted for the diskette, I'd insert one and hit "okay" and it would crash. Oh, well.

It's notable that most Vaio's have some space in a hidden partition for the suspend mode. I've read about it, my Vaio has it, but I can't find it. I didn't do anything radical, though, and I can still go into suspend mode (though I have no real use to), so it seems to be fine. Just beware of it, though, and maybe check some of the How-tos for other Sony Vaios.

It took a little experimenting to get the partition sizes correct. If this is your first time installing Linux, you may want to go with one of the standard installs, like Workstation. I chose Custom, but that's mainly because I knew what I did and didn't want and that I'm a control freak. Choosing Custom meant I had to create the partitions for Linux myself. While not nuclear physics, it is a bit unnerving to fiddle with it when you still want to keep your Windows intact. At first I made the root partition too small, and got an error while installing (first, I ran out of space, but then I got a "resource busy" error and was stuck). Since I couldn't go forward or back, I rebooted, started the install over (I even had to use Disk Druid to define the names of the partitions again) and made more space for / (root). This time, no error. Whew. So, if you get that 'resource busy' error when you are installing, don't panic, rebooting is okay (at least it was for me).

Everything else went okay, but I did make the / (root) partition too small, again. I should have made a separate /usr partition to store all the libs and bins and such that take up about half of my hard drive space. I've since nuked the Windows partition and moved /usr to it (more on that in a minute).

I had a fair number of troubles getting the networking going. I have a PCMCIA Linksys Etherfast card for my LAN, and I use a modem at home or wherever else. The problem was that during the install, I chose not to probe for a card, because nothing listed was my PCMCIA card. Somehow, though, tulip.o got installed and working. Tulip.o is the loadable module that works with a number of PCMCIA cards, including the Linksys I have. I found out about it during a visit to the Linksys web site (www.linksys.com)

So, at first, I didn't know it was 'installed', and tried to get my modem going first. This set me back a few hours, as it wouldn't work at all. I tried it with minicom, mucked and mucked and messed and messed and somehow (!) got it working. I'm really not sure how. I think it was because I accidentally killed the PCMCIA card that was running in the background (unbeknownst to me). Then, after getting dialups to work (in X windows, as root, type netcfg, to start a simple networking interface tool), I shutdown and took it home to finish after dinner and the kids were in bed.

So I start it up about 10pm, ready to logon and check my email, when, of course, it didn't work. To make a long story short, two hours later I figured out that the PCMCIA card was being started during the boot process, but it was being started after networking was being started. So, while it looked like there was no networking (I was looking in the routing tables using route -n), there was, it just errored out during boot because there was no interface (the NIC card, the Linksys, wasn't getting started until after). I changed some files in /etc/rc.d/rc3.d, /etc/rc.d/rc6.d and etc/rc.d/rc1.d and now it comes up in the correct order. See the Linux Documentation Project if you want to go messing with the /etc/rc.d stuff.

But, still, the modem wasn't working. After I figured out that networking was in fact coming up, (I figured it out by checking my device situation (cat /proc/devices) and low and behold, there it was!) So, I stopped the device (as root, do /etc/rc.d/init.d/pcmcia stop) and it killed the card, and with it my network. A little research turned up that my modem was on the same IRQ as the PCMCIA card. I left it that way, since I don't use the modem and card at the same time. I now had both the NIC card and modem working, though not at the same time. To use the modem, I just stopped the PCMCIA card, to use the card, I just restarted it (replace 'stop' with 'start' in the above command)

The next day I brought the Vaio back to work, hooked it to the network and got nowhere. After a little muddling around, I determined my routing tables were a little off, so I added this line to my /etc/rc.d/rc.local file:

/sbin/route add default gw 192.168.1.1 metric 1 (if you don't know route, you need to see the LDP, because it's important, but way beyond what a) I know b) I have time to explain. Sorry)

The rc.local file is like a autoexec.bat file for a MSDOS machine. In the case of rc.local, it is run as a shell script as the last thing before the machine is done booting.

In between, I also had to configure X windows, which was much easier. Actually, I just typed Xconfigurator and let it probe (see the man pages for Xconfigurator and look for kickstart). It found everything, recommended a setup for me and I went with it. Later, I tried to change it and it errored out, but I just went back to the old setup and it worked. Basically, you need to know your monitor type (mine is SVGA) and refresh rate. Nothing in my computer's specs gave me a refresh rate, and I'm not even sure if LCD displays have them (I don't know anything about that stuff).

The PCG-748 has one of those awful touchpad mice and it's standard on the PS/2 port. The Xconfigurator found that easily. However, I like to hook an external mouse to my serial port, so I ran mouseconfig and chose the Standard Serial Device, Com1 (cua0 or ttyS0) and saved it. You have to do this before starting X (startx). Once done, though, it worked fine. When I want to use the touchpad (rarely), I just run mouseconfig, chose the PS/2 device and save.

I'm a web designer, so I have installed Apache, PHP, MySQL, IMAP, LDAP and other such software, to varying degrees of success. Nothing about the laptop seems to cause any trouble.

After about a week of never booting into Windows, I decided to blow that partition and go all Linux. This was a little scary. First, of note, though, L-M automagically mounts the DOS partition and gives me access to it. So, I had complete access to all my work files and could easily copy them from /mnt/DOS_hda1 to /home/hans. Once I did that, and verified that I had everything, I nuked old Windows.

This is a little scary, but I managed to get through it. Basically, after copying my work files and verifying that I had everything I needed, I checked the partition using fdisk /dev/hda. I changed the file system type (the 't' command) for partition 1 (hda1, my DOS stuff) to 83, the Linux ext2 file system type. Then I used the mke2fs command (format in DOS) to format the partition correctly. This only takes a moment, which worried me at first. It works, though. Then, I made a directory called /usr2 and copied all of the files from /usr/share to it (I wanted to do all of /usr, but it wouldn't fit). Then, I edited the /etc/fstab file system table to read

/dev/hda1               /usr/share              ext2    defaults        1 2 

This, I believe, tells Linux to mount these partitions upon boot. I mounted them manually (mount /usr/share) and tested it. It worked. NOTE: I am missing some information here. This took a few tries to get it right. I remember having a weird situation between removing the old /usr/share files and mounting the new partition. So, BE CAREFUL!

I still don't have the sound card stuff working right now (there are errors gallore when I exit out of X). Right now, I'm not concerned, though, as this is more of a work machine. (But wait! Read the email from David below... sound now works! I'm listening to John Prine right now.)

Hope it helps... Let me know if you have any questions. I'm not an expert, but I might have run into a problem that I can help you solve!