LinuxQuestions.org - Linux on Vaio VGN-FS8900M

Just recently purchased a Sony Vaio VGN-FS8900M laptop. Lots of bang for the buck, complete with DVD burner, 1280x800 widescreen resolution, good 3D acceleration, and decent battery life.

Installed Suse 10.1beta on it, and have had very good results. Everything works right out of the gate, with the exception of the Intel IPW2200 wireless card, and the Winmodem. I haven't tested the memory stick or Firewire (yet), but since they worked on my previous Vaio, I am pretty confident they'll also work on this one.

Things that work:
- CPU throttling works fine. I use Enlightenment DR17 as my desktop, and the CPUFREQ module goes between 500 MHz and 1.8 GHZ, depending on what I'm doing.
- Cooling fan goes on/off as needed, and I can watch the temperature rise and fall using the temperature module under DR17.
- ACPI reports battery usage correctly, and when you're on AC power or not.
- USB mouse/keyboard works correctly
- Onboard ethernet works perfectly
- Sound works perfectly, although everything was muted after the initial system load, which was annoying.

Things that don't work:
- The FN keys for brightness/volume/etc.

Things that need tweaking, to get it 'just right':
- Be sure to load the sonypi and the sony_acpi modules. I've put these in /etc/sysconfig/kernel, to be loaded at boot time. While I haven't had luck in getting sonypi to get/set brightness on the screen, I can use

- echo "1" > /proc/acpi/sony/brightness

to lower the brightness of the LCD. The values are 1-8, and that works fine. Still working on an elegant way to do this, though, perhaps through the FN keys.

To resolve the wireless issue, you'll have to get the ipw2200 drivers from Sourceforge, and compile/install them, along with the firmware. Oddly enough, Suse comes with an ipw2200 driver, and it will detect the card correctly and try to load it. However, if you look at dmesg, you'll see where it dumps with a -5 return code, and the interface won't show up in an ifconfig. After loading the Sourceforge drivers, performing a "modprobe ipw2200" as root will get you success messages in dmesg, and the eth1 interface will show up in an ifconfig. The WEP settings and ESSID settings can be easily handled through YAST, under the network hardware settings. Just edit that interface, and modify the values as needed.

The winmodem is an easy fix as well. Just visit linuxant dot com, and go to the conexant modems page under the drivers tab. Download the scanmodem.gz file, and execute it, and it will tell you which driver you need. The free version is limited to 14.4Kb, data only. However, for $19, you can get the full version, which supports both data and fax, which works nicely with Hylafax, too.

Hope this helps someone.