SuSE Linux 9.1 on the Sony VAIO A215M

This web page describes my experiences with the installation of SuSE Linux 9.1 om the Sony VAIO A215M laptop. For several specific problems I had to apply some 'special' solutions.

Basic installation
Screen resolution
Screen brightness
Wireless network
3D graphics acceleration
CD and DVD burning
CD playing

Basic installation

No problems found. Just follow the installation routine. Also make sure you install the C++ compiler (g++) and the kernel-source package.

Screen resolution

After installation, the screen will be in resolution 1024x768 which does not fit nicely with the native resolution of 1280x800. To solve this problem you need to get a correct XF86Config and put it in the /etc/X11 directory. The best thing is probably to look at this file and adapt your local XF86Config file (at least make a backup before you replace it).

Screen brightness

Two problems need to be solved:

Install driver: You need to be able to adjust the brightness.
Configure function keys: You want to do this using function keys.

Install the driver

There is a project called sonypi. The project provides a driver 'sonypi' which does not work for this laptop, but also an acpi driver. Look for the link for the 'standalone version'.

Configure function keys

To make it easy to adjust the brightness, I implemnted the following solution:

A script for increasing the brightness and a script for decreasing the brightness. Map keys to execute the scripts in KDE. I used Ctrl-F5 and Crtl-F6 for this.

Wireless network

For the Intel Wireless 2200 card there is a native driver available at sourceforge. Download it and follow the instructions. At the end, the driver ipw2200.ko will be located in kernel/drivers/net/wireless/ipw2200.ko in the /lib/modules/-default directory.

Now, what remains is to configure the wireless card using yast2. Start up yast2 and go to Network Devices/Network card. Add a new card and use the module name ipw2200 to configure the card. After configuration, the card's name will be eth0.

NOTE: It is generally wise to edit the files created by yast2 and add the line DHCLIENT_PRIMARY_DEVICE=yes to the files ifcfg-eth0 and ifcfg-eth-id-<your other card> in /etc/sysconfig network. This ensures that your default gateway is always initialized regardless of which network interface is started up first.

3D graphics acceleration

ATI has a linux driver for the network card. To find out the version of XFree you are running, type 'rpm -qi XFree86'. This information is required to download the correct driver.

Install the downloaded rpm as usual: rpm -Uvh <rpmfile>.rpm

Modify your /etc/X11/XF86Config as described in the instructions, or use my version as an example.

CD and DVD burning

CD and DVD burning appears to work out of the box, except for a few annoying quirks. Therefore, some additional instructions:

You need a newer version of the dvd+rw-tools. To get the downloaded package to work, I had to change the dependencies in the spec file and created . my own rpm from these sources. This rpm should work immediately on SuSE linux. In particular, there was a dependence on kernel-headers whereas SuSE 9.1 provides only kernel-source.
Any user needs to be able to mount/unmount the cd/dvd. To do this, add the users property to the entry for the dvd in /etc/fstab. My line for the dvd recorder looks like this:
```
  /dev/dvdrecorder     /media/dvdrecorder   subfs      fs=cdfss,ro,users,procuid,n
osuid,nodev,exec,iocharset=utf8 0 0
  
```
:

Playing CDs

When playing a CD, your will typically get no sound. One of the ways I can currently play a CD is using XMMS and by configuring digital extraction. This means that instead of the CD player generating the audio directly, the data is read from the CD and transformed into sound by an application.

To configure this in XMMS, proceed as follows: right-click, options/preferences. Click on the cd audio player plugin (libcdaudio) and click configure. Now select play mode: digital audio extraction and configure the directory /media/dvdrecorder for the CD player. To play a CD, open the play list editor and add the directory /media/dvdrecorder to it. It will then recognize the tracks on the CD.

Other tools which can be used are kxine and kaffeine but these are primarily video players.

Questions?

In case of any problems or question, just send me.a mail.