This page describes my experiences in getting Debian/GNU Linux (Etch
release, 4.01) to run on this laptop.
Summary
Most things work out-of-the box. Nice, given the nightmares I remember
on then-up-to-date laptops 10 years ago.
Camera does not work, HSDPA modem only works when booting after a
soft-reset from Vista. Fingerprint sensor tools not available in Debian
standard sources, so not yet tested.
Camera
The device is called Sony VGP-VCC7, built from the Ricoh
R5U870
chipset.
It pretends to be UVC
capable, but needs to have its firmware uploaded.
This is what lsusb sees:
Bus 005 Device 005: ID 05ca:183a Ricoh Co., Ltd
The firmware is located in the Windows driver file R5U870FLx86.sys
that can be found in your C:\Drivers\Camera\VGP-VCC7\
directory.
Mine has firmware version 0x0111, and md5sum says df4dbd3c9a6fac6f805ff62fb186ed65
R5U870FLx86.sys.
To get it into the format the the r5u870 driver
expects I
used the following script: recode-fw.scm.
You will need to have guile
installed to run it.
Once you have extracted the firmware into r5u870_183a.fw
you can patch the r5u870-0.10.0
driver (here's a local copy)
using
this file: r5u870-0.10.0-vcc7patch.
(I'm still waiting
for a reply from the driver's author whether he'll incorporate my
changes in a new release.)
HSDPA Modem
There is a builtin 3G/GSM modem, which is based on Option's
"Globetrotter
Module HSDPA GTM378" chipset. If detected correctly by the
kernel it works nicely with the option.ko (and usbserial.ko) driver
module, since its ID (0af0:6901) is well-known. However, 2.6.18, 2.6.21 and 2.6.22
do not properly detect it, unless they are booted after a soft-reset of
Vista, which presumably initializes it. I am still investigating this
issue, since the system setup is apparently a bit strange:
Powersaving
powertop
suggests a large number of powersaving possibilities, extending
battery life with the extra-capacity battery on an unconnected system
(no ethernet, no wlan, no cdrom autodetect, no bluetooth) to more than
8 hours. Nice.
Sound
Alsa driver snd_hda_intel works nicely, even though it
complains about an unknown device:
hda_codec: Unknown model for ALC262, trying auto-probe from BIOS...
| Utz-Uwe
Haus, 2007-10-10 |
 |