Hi! I have a sony vaio laptop (VAIO VGN-S5M/S) with SUSE 10.1 installed on it. I have two issues with it:

1) I cant adjust the brightness (max by default) of the laptop. I loaded the sonypi module and there were no errors. I then tried to use kpowesave to adjust the brightness but it didn't change. I also tried 'echo 2> /proc/acpi/sony/brightness' to change the brightness but I wasn't sucessful. The surprising thing is that it worked on Ubuntu 6.0 directly using the Fn key conbination. I sincerely would love any pointer on how to solve this problem since my battery drains much faster and I find it hard to read from very bright screens.

2) My memory stick drive is not working. Is there any workaround, the tips I got seemed to be for older vaio laptops.

Thanks a lot for your help.

In addition to the sonypi module, you need to get fsfn to make the Fn keys control brightness (&volume)
My sony has a memory stick slot that is also not recognised. It is described as "MagicGate" or similar, I think it has some sort of DRM attached to it, so I just ignored it, and used an external multi-slot USB cardreader which works fine.

HTH

Thanks tredegar,fsfn - how do I get it? I have found a way to reduce the brightness of the lcd, I use a program - smartdimmer. It is really wonderful. This is the link: http://www.acc.umu.se/~erikw/program...er-0.1.tar.bz2

I hope that will help other vaio users, next is to get the memory stick to work ...

The same way that you can get most software for linux.... put fsfn linux into google, and then follow a link like this one:

http://www.linux-laptop.net/hosted/u...vgnfs315b.html

These instructions are for ubuntu, but apply equally to other distros.

But maybe smartdimmer is doing what you need already?

HTH

Wow! I have tried to use fsfn but the patched sony_acpi module (there is no fnkey file in /proc/acpi/sony) is not working well on my suse. I will just have to look for another alternative or switch to Ubuntu Thanks a lot for your support.

"there is no fnkey file in /proc/acpi/sony"

I have the same problem on FC6...

I didn't find it either. I eventually got everything running though, sadly that's not the case now!