that’s whacked

OpenSolaris/Solaris on Sony VAIO TX

Sunday, Apr 22. 2007  –  Category: OpenSolaris

I just recently got a new laptop, a Sony Vaio TX – and have found that it supports OpenSolaris quite nicely… specifically, I’ve installed builds 60 and 62 of Solaris Express Community Edition and have been really happy with it.

Discounting the whole Vista/GRUB fight (many thanks to moinak for his blog entries walking through how to get that up)

So here’s a brief run down of what works and what doesn’t work:

• Wireless: Yes, using the soon-to-be-released wpi driver for the Intel 3945ABG mini-PCIe card. No, you can’t just replace it with an Atheros, since this machine uses the mini-PCIe (PCI Express) bus.
• Speedstep: Yes, frkit’s powernow driver seems to support it quite well cycling between 1.33ghz, 1ghz, and 800mhz (I get about 4.5-5 hours under Solaris)
• X: Yes. Initially I wasn’t able to get it to work until I got a prototype agpgart driver from the guys in ERI (should be integrating soon) that adds support for the i945GMS card in this laptop. This allows the X i810 driver to allocate more than 8 megs of RAM. Once I got that up, I noticed X defaulted to 1368×768, which gives a 2 pixel pan and scan horizontally – but 1366×768 is a supported resolution, so it was just a simple matter of going to the Screen Resolution Properties and changing back to 1366×768.
• External video out: Yes, had to add the following two lines to my i810 “Device” section:

  Option          "MonitorLayout" "CRT,LFP"
  Option          "Clone" "true"
  

Here are the things that don’t work:

• Internal SD/memory stick memory card reader. There is a Linux driver, and a prototype (non-functional) BSD driver.
• Bluetooth
• Wireless WAN (though I hear it’s just a USB modem, so maybe… who knows. I don’t use Sprint, so I don’t really care)
• The Fn controls. This is problematic in that two of them control the LCD brightness. Up until last night I thought the only way to change the brightness would be to boot into Vista and do it, which is really tedious. Last night I realised that an easier (but still annoying) method is to boot into the AV/DVD player mode, and change the brightness from there before booting into Solaris. Like I said, still annoying – but manageable. There is a Linux driver that adds support for those controls which hook into ACPI; unfortunately, we’d have to reverse-engineer it cleanly since that driver is GPLd.

The screen brightness is a tad annoying – but I can live with it since I don’t change the brightness that often. I’ve been really stoked with this laptop… 5 hours of battery life with a 2.8 pound laptop is great… this thing is heaps better and nicer to commute with than the Ferrari 4000 I previously had.