[luau] Laptop that works with Linux

[Warren Togami]

All components of my Sony Vaio PCG-FXA36 notebook work in Linux except for
the winmodem.  All Duron and Athlon notebooks made by Sony currently use the
same motherboard so you will have the same results with any model.

Drawbacks of this notebook...
1. The ATI Mobility Mach64 video is unaccelerated with default XFree86 4.20
drivers but XFree86 4.30 may have the accelerated driver that is currently
in development (you can download it from the devel site).
2. Battery life with standard APM is horrible.  The single battery lasts
maybe 15-30 minutes before death.
3. Adding a second battery makes it last perhaps 1 hour 15 minutes, but APM
is unable to show battery indicator until the second battery is drained,
after which it begins to count down from 100%.
4. Battery life with ACPI is 200-600% better.  Unfortunately the currently
"stable" ACPI is unable to probe the battery life.  The new ACPI test
patches is able to probe the battery life, but it causes the entire system
to become unstable, sometimes rendering the keyboard inoperable until a
reboot.  Many people are complaining about this particular laptop
motherboard on ACPI-devel mailing list so hopefully it'll be fixed soon.
5. The community is getting close to getting the winmodem to work.
Binary-only drivers exist and we are getting some help from the
manufacturer.

So basically, these Sony Vaio Athlon notebooks are great for Linux if you
don't care about 3 things:
1. Battery life.
2. Accelerated 3D video.
3. Dial-up Internet

Very cheap for the amount of processing power you get too.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jon Reynolds" <jonr at destar.net>
To: "LUAU" <luau at videl.ics.hawaii.edu>
Sent: Sunday, May 05, 2002 12:34 PM
Subject: Re: [luau] Laptop that works with Linux


> Thanks for the suggestions. My work is purchasing me a new laptop and I
> wanted to make sure I could use Linux on it.
>
> Jon
>