Installing OpenSUSE Linux 10.2 / 10.3 on a Sony Vaio TXN25N

This document describes my experience with getting SUSE Linux 10.2 and 10.3 running on a Sony Vaio TXN25N (VGN-TXN25N, model number PCG-4K1L). I hope this will be useful. It should be more or less applicable to other TXN series laptops too, depending on how close they are.

OpenSUSE 10.2 had kernel version 2.6.18.8-0.5-default; with 10.3, I'm now using 2.6.22.5-31-default. Note that I haven't had this machine long, and I haven't put too much effort into some of the features listed below; I'm not interested in memory sticks, for example. I'm too busy to do major investigations, but reasonable requests for info or simple tests will be heeded. See Contact Info at end.

This report is listed at TuxMobil - Linux on laptops, notebooks, PDAs, mobile phones. Check the site out for lots more information about mobile Linux.

Recent Changes:

• 12 August: Optical drive info, screen size fix
• 12 August: Battery life test
• 15 August: Graphics info
• 18 August: Hardware clock woes
• 19 August: Software updates, WiFi, more hardware clock
• 7 September: More BlueTooth experiences; new carrying case; font sizes
• 12 September: DVD playback quality
• 26 September: Updated benchmark results with UnixBench 5.0
• 7 October: Updated for OpenSUSE 10.3 (I've had 10.3 for a day, so this is an early update). Plus dual-layer DVD, WiFi issues.
• 9 October: Hardware clock: possible workaround; SD reader now works.
• 12 October: 3D graphics update.

Hardware Specifications:

lspci:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/PM/GMS/940GML and 945GT Express Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB UHCI #4 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev e2)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801GBM (ICH7-M) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) IDE Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801G (ICH7 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 02)
02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (rev 02)
06:04.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCIxx12 Cardbus Controller
06:04.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments PCIxx12 OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller
06:04.2 Mass storage controller: Texas Instruments 5-in-1 Multimedia Card Reader (SD/MMC/MS/MS PRO/xD)
06:08.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation PRO/100 VM Network Connection (rev 02)

General Impressions:

Very nice! I've had a number of Sonys, and have generally been happy with them, but this seems like a bit of a gem. Still, you have to understand its strong and weak points. The processor is low-powered, and the graphics adaptor is dismal, so forget about fancy 3D apps and games. Google Earth runs acceptably well, fortunately (now that they've fixed whatever bug was making the window manager crash). The payback for this is an incredibly small, lightweight but full-featured laptop, with a battery which lasts for hours.

The size is also great. I was looking for the smallest machine with a keyboard I could really use, and I think that's exactly what I got. The key pitch is 17mm, which makes it a little tight, and coupled with the very small key travel not exactly natural-feeling. But I can type fine (and I have big fingers), and the machine fits on a tray table on a trans-Atlantic flight in economy, and keeps me entertained for pretty much the whole trip on a single charge, which is exactly what I wanted. Nice one Sony!

I like that the USB slots are on the left; this doesn't interfere with the mouse if I have eg. an external drive plugged in. For some reason, the front USB is behind a flap, which seems unnecessary, but I rarely need it — my Logitech Bluetooth mouse is fantastic, and makes life much easier (no cable or dongle to fuss with). The only snag here is that the rear USB port is covered up if you use a laptop lock.

The display is fantastic; colours are noticeably deeper and richer than on other displays. I've used it ouside in the shade on bright sunny days with no problems.

Movies:

DVD playback works superbly well in Kaffeine under OpenSUSE; there is no noticeable aliasing compared to playing under Instant Mode or Windows, and playback is very smooth (not jerky, like under Windows). One less reason to keep Windows — excellent!

To play encrypted DVDs (ie. most commercial DVDs) you will need to install the "libdvdcss" add-on.

• For OpenSUSE 10.2, see Freshmeat.net. It boils down to installing a single RPM (look in the "rpm" directory of the download page).
• For OpenSUSE 10.3, you can just add the "VideoLan Repository" in the "Community Repositories" section of YaST, and then just install "libdvdcss". You may also need "libxine1".

One nice feature is the "built-in" Instant Mode which allows the machine to act as a CD and DVD player without booting Linux. The DVD player is good once you get used to the slightly odd controls; it starts a lot faster, of course, and it might use a little less power this way. But don't delete Windows — that will kill Instant Mode! See my Instant Mode and Linux page for more on this.

Getting Mobile:

Carrying this tiny, lightweight machine around is a blast, of course; but finding a carrying case which is small enough to fit well can be a little trickier.

• I have a Lowepro Compudaypack laptop/camera backpack which works OK — the laptop slides vertically into the pocket, with the adaptor and mouse in a separate pouch (from another case) stuffed down beside it to fill the space. I removed the camera/lens padding in the bottom compartment, and I have that plus the front compartment for luggage. I travelled to Scotland for a week with just this pack, as hand luggage, which was great.
• I also haveThe Pouch; it's a little loose and not as thickly padded as I'd like. It provides a degree of protection in a backpack, though, and it has a shoulder strap too.
• The best find to date was the REI E-Wrap computer sleeve, size X-small. This has Velcro openings on two edges, and these have adjustable closing positions; I have the end one fully closed, and this makes a tight fit. The result is a snug and firmly-padded case with a front pocket that just about takes my Blutetooth mouse.

Negatives:

The machine comes pre-loaded with Windows Vista Business; naturally, I would have preferred a blank hard drive. Vista is undoubtedly the worst thing ever to come out of Redmond, which is saying a lot, and it's such a resource hog that it only barely runs on this machine. For example, when you log in, you get the cute start-up jingle; but it stutters so badly you can hardly recognise it! I just can't understand why Sony would install an OS that makes their product look so crappy. Also, it wastes an unbelievable amount of disk space; after spending a full day de-installing everything I could in the Control Center, then deleting old restore points, cleaning the disk, and doing a de-frag, it still used up 17 gigs of hard disk space. This is so bad next to Linux it's embarassing. I have now wiped Windows off entirely (see my Instant Mode and Linux page before doing this, though).

The DVD drive eject button is recessed and under an overhang on the side of the drive; it's hard to see, and can only be operated with a pencil or such, which is a nasty annoyance. Note that I'm talking about the electronic button; the "paper-clip" mechanical eject is there too for emergencies, but as I said, even the regular electronic eject button is extremely awkward to get to. You can just about do it with the corner of a fingernail, if your nails are sharp. There is, of course, an easy-to-access eject button on the keyboard; however, this is some weird thing that doesn't work at all under Linux. The other "media" keys (fast forward, pause, etc.) at least generate key events, but this one doesn't. This is a pain even under Windows, since it only works when Windows is in a "happy and responsive" state, which with Vista isn't that often. For Linux, I mapped F12 to run the "eject" command, which helps a lot.

The display is so flexible that it presses on the keyboard when packed away, and picks up finger-grease from the keys, enough so that you can read the key names off the screen when the sun hits it right. The solution is a protection slip kept between screen and keyboard when it's not in use — not a big price to pay for such a compact machine. I have a cloth protector for this, which works very well. Still, I reckon that you'll want to treat this machine gently. Cleaning the screen is awkward — a moist wipe left huge smears all over it. Definitely keep your fingers off.

My only other gripe is the touchpad. I pretty much hate touchpads, and this one seems to be pretty poor, specially under Linux. I could probably tune that a bit, but my solution is to get a Bluetooth mouse -- problem solved.

Basic Installation of OpenSUSE Linux 10.2:

I've been a SUSE user for a long time; their stuff always seemed good and well-packaged, with good admin tools. OpenSUSE works great for me; I recently did trials of CentOS, Fedora and Ubuntu, and kept coming back to OpenSUSE — mainly because of YaST, the admin tool.

Installation was a blast: I downloaded and burned a DVD, then just ran it. I asked it to resize the Windows (NTFS) partition to make space, and it all just worked. Dual booting works fine.

The big snag I hit was when I decided that I don't need Windows any more, so I re-formatted the partition to use in Linux. This was great, except that Instant Mode stopped working, so I could no longer play DVDs! Instant Mode isn't really built in — although it doesn't run under Windows, its software is stored in the Windows partition. So nuke that partition and you lose Instant Mode. See my Instant Mode and Linux page for how I fixed this.

Hardware Clock:

OpenSUSE seems to have a problem setting the hardware clock! Either that, or the clock itself is extremely wonky. Basically, every time I boot, the clock has gained or lost a lot of time — anything from minutes to an hour. It seems to happen with NTP disabled, and with NTP enabled — though in the latter case, I often boot with no network.

I noticed that /etc/adjtime had a huge (nearly an hour) time adjustment, so maybe the adjustment was getting computed wrongly somehow. I disabled it by editing /etc/rc.d/boot.clock, and disabling the test in the "start" case where it checks $SYSTOHC, by changing "$SYSTOHC" = "yes" to "$SYSTOHC" = "never":

            echo -n Setting up the hardware clock

            if test "$SYSTOHC" = "never" ; then
                #
                # We write back the system time later at
                # reboot/shutdown time.
                #
                if test ! -f /etc/adjtime ; then

Since then, it seems to work fine.

Graphics Card:

I initially got graphics working during the OpenSUSE 10.2 install, with a bit of fiddling with xorg.conf, but with a resolution of 1368x768; sounds good, but the screen is 1366x768! This could be fixed using the resize and rotate applet. In OpenSUSE 10.3 the resolution is fine, once the correct driver is set up.

The driver was a bit of an issue: it seems I was using a substandard driver, until I happened to run 3Ddiag and it told me to make some changes to my xorg.conf. I did that, and 3D performance is a bit faster — from 169 in the ubgears test to 210. Still not amazing, but I can run the GLMatrix screensaver. The triick is to add 2 lines to xorg.conf: Load "dri" in "Module" and Driver "intel" (instead of i810) in "Device". I guess OpenSuSE didn't fix this when I upgraded to 10.3?

The brightness control didn't work in 10.2 — it displays a bar control which you could move from 0% to 100%, but didn't do anything. In OpenSUSE 10.3, this now works fine.

You can check out my full xorg.conf.

Font Sizes:

If you set the correct physical screen size, you'll end up using tiny font sizes; 7-point gave me a size I was comfortable reading. The problem here is that the steps from 6 to 7 to 8 are quite large, so you don't have any fine font control.

The solution I chose was to lie about the screen size, configuring it to be about 50% larger than it is. Now, to get that same comfortable font, I set it to 10 point; this gives me better fine control. The line that does this in my xorg.conf is:

    Section "Monitor"
      DisplaySize  351 197
      . . .

Optical Drive:

The marketing spec sheet on the web site says the optical drive is "DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/DVD-RAM". The store's web page says it's a "4x DVD+R DL; 4x DVD-R DL; 8x8x8 DVD+RW; 8x6x8 DVD-RW; 5x5 DVD-RAM; 24x16x24 CD-RW Drive". There's nothing written on the drive. Linux detects it as "MATSHITA DVD-RAM_UJ-852S_HB32_055539".

It certainly reads DVDs OK, and it writes a single-layer DVD with no problem. I had a problem writing a double-layer DVD in K3b with the default settings; I got the message "mkisofs returned an unknown error (code 255)". This may have been caused by the data not being made ready fast enough for the drive — the default setting is to write directly to the DVD, rather than creating the filesystem image on your hard drive first.

The workaround seems to be easy — I checked the "Burn Options" setting "create image", wrote a 6.2 GB backup to a DL DVD with no problem, and subsequently verified it. The only problem here is that you'll need enough temp. file space to create the image.

WiFi:

In OpenSUSE 10.2, WiFi worked straight from the install, no problem. Since upgrading to 10.3, I've had a few issues. There seem to be two drivers: "ipw3945", and "iwl3945". Right now I managed to get it working again by re-configuring the network card in YaST to use the "iwl3945" driver, and then rebooting (the reboot seems to be required). I'm not sure what the deal is here, and it's tricky to work on 'cos I'm not too confident with the WiFi providers I'm using.

Performance:

Drags on graphics — even Empire Earth II (under Vista) was too slow for comfort — but adequate for everything else. It's certainly perfectly responsive in KDE (I can't say the same for Vista).

To be more scientific, here are the results of a benchmarking run. This data was produced under OpenSUSE 10.2, using the 2.6.18.8 kernel, with UnixBench 5.0. The index group of tests was used, and run with one simultaneous process.

    Single processing          498.4

You can check out the full results.

Battery Life:

After owning it for a couple of weeks, so the battery has been cycled a few times, I am now seeing consistently close to 5 hours battery life. Today I had a pretty heavy session of WiFi networking, using Bluetooth for the mouse, and editing, and got 4 hours 48 minutes of use before it shut down.

Now that the brightness controls work (see "Graphics Card" above) it may be even better — I'll try it sometime.

OpenSUSE Issues:

Extras: Package management is drastically improved under OpenSUSE 10.3; the "Community Repositories" feature makes it super-easy to add extry repositories. Yay!

Updates: Under 10.2, I had to repeat the online update configuration several times to keep updates working; not sure why. I think this is going to be way better under 10.3, now that Zen is gone.

WiFi: The default mode which OpenSUSE 10.2 sets up for the WiFi card is to activate the device on cable connection (see YaST -> "Network Card" -> Edit the card -> "General"). The problem is that if you start the laptop with the hardware WiFi switch turned off, Linux seems to have trouble recognising the card if you then turn the switch on.

I've changed this setting to activate the device at boot time, which seems to fix this. I have yet to test this with 10.3.

Contact Information:

• johantheghost at yahoo period com

Links:

• OpenSUSE
• Sony Support — VGN-TXN25N/B
• Sony Direct Accessories and Parts
• Installing Linux on the Sony VGN-TXN Series, Mark A. Davis. Not the same machine, but there's some interesting info here.
• Notebook Review's Sony forum — not Linux-specific, but some useful info nonetheless.
• Sony VAIO VGN-TXN Series page at the Linux Laptop Wiki.
• Sony VAIO VGN-TXN Series Discussion at the Linux Laptop Wiki.