Bought a new Vaio VPCF1 last year, and loaded openSUSE 11.3 on it. Most everything worked, but had to fiddle with it a good bit. And by the time I got it, 11.4 was a good way along, so I decided to wait to post upgrade notes.

First, there are a few issues with Linux on the VPCF1 series. The mostly center around the internal mic, the nVidia card backlight, and the function keys.

First, the sound related problems that were posted about by others. A 'standard' openSUSE 11.4 load includes the patch to Alsa to support the ALC275 card and microphone right out of the gate, so no tweaking is necessary to make it work with Skype or other audio capture programs. Pulseaudio is enabled by default, as is the new Bluedevil bluetooth manager (more on that later). My bluetooth headset was easily paired with the laptop. The only tweak I had to make to get it going in Skype, was to go into the audio configuration (Kmix->Settings->Audio Setup->Communication), and move my headset to the top of the list. That way, when my headset is ON, the system detects it and automagically switches a call to it. When I turn it off, it goes back to speaker/mic on the laptop. Very slick. The headphone/mic jacks on the side work fine, but unless you've got a wired headset, you won't need them, unless you want to listen to music via headphones.

The new Bluedevil app is great...make it VERY easy to pair devices, and get things working. Keyboards, mice, headphones all work fine. My only gripe (and they're working on it), is that serial devices (like a GPS receiver) are VISIBLE, but you can't attach them to a serial service. Still have to use rfcomm to do it....the gadgets will WORK, but you have to manually add them to /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf, as you had to back in the 'old days'.

The FN keys for volume and mute work fine, but you have to be sure to switch the channel they control (again, KMix->Settings->Select Master Channel), and swtich it to be the "Internal Audio" source, rather than HDMI. You can still just adjust the volume via slider, but the FN keys are handy. The FN keys for brightness don't work, without a simple tweak in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. NOTE: this assumes you've loaded the nVidia driver from the nVidia website. As of this, I'm using 260.19.44, and ran the installer from their instructions (lengthy, and documented by them, but the steps work). Once done, edit the device section to look like this:
A 'standard' nVidia driver load omits the Option lines. Without those, the brightness OSD comes up alright...but won't let you adjust the brightness, either by FN keys or via the Powermanager slider. Adding those lines makes it all work fine.

Right out of the box, most everything works perfectly under openSUSE 11.4. Wirless and wired ethernet, bluetooth, the media control keys, webcam, and blue-ray drive. DVD burning has no problems, and after loading the packman repository, CDs/DVDs/MP3s all play fine. The nVidia driver lets all the KDE 4.6 eye candy work beautifully and smoothly, and supports the HDMI connector correctly. Esata drives mount up nicely too.

The only two things that DON'T work are the three 'hard' FN keys (Assist, S1, and Vaio) and the MemoryStick HG slot. The SD card slot works fine, but not the Memorystick, which is odd since it's off the same controller. The three hard keys don't bother me, since I can't think of anything I'd like them to do. I'm sure they can be mapped via KHotkeys or through acpi events, but I'm not going to bother.