Installation of Linux on a SONY PCG-GRT390ZP Laptop

I recently purchased a Sony PCG-GRT390ZP laptop with the intention of having it dual-boot linux and Windows XP. The system I purchased has the following hardware.

On first boot, I was asked to make a restore CD set. After burning the 10 CDs (or one DVD), I rebooted using the SONY recovery CD. The Startup CD runs for awhile, then asks for disk 1. Disk 1 comes with the option to repartition things and to delete the recovery drive. I set C: to be 15GB. By Default it then puts the rest of the disk into the D: drive, but I will go back and fix this later.

I am now ready to start installing linux. I went through several different versions of linux, all of which were quirky in some way. My preferred solution was going to be Mandrake 10, but I eventually gave up on this. What is crucial is to download the latest NVIDIA drivers from the nvidia website.

RedHat Enterprise Level 3

/dev/hda1	windows XP (un touched)	15000 MB	ntfs	1	1959	15735636 Blocks
/dev/hda2	/boot	100 MB	ext3	1960	1972	104422 Blocks
/dev/hda3	/	10000 MB	ext3	1973	3247	10241437 Blocks
/dev/hda5	/users	40000 MB	ext3	3248	8346	40957686 Blocks
/dev/hda6	swap	1000 MB	ext3	8347	8473	1020096 Blocks
/dev/hda7	/users/msdos	9000 MB	vfat	8474	9729	10088788 Blocks

The install went without a hitch. The only thing special that I did was not to have X automatically started. After the first boot, downloaded and installed the nvidia patch, and then modified the /etc/X11/XFree86 file. I then issued a startx command, and the console came up beautifully. However, the power management and the sound card did not work in this install.

I was able to start Gnome just fine, but KDE hung up on starting peripherals and I had to hard boot the system. As I really wanted a 2.6 kernel, I stopped playing at this point.

Mandrake 10

Fedora Core 2 Test 3

There are apparently some problems with the 2.6 kernel released with Fedora. After a lot of research, I found a reference to two kernel options that need to be disabled:
CONFIG_REGPARMS = n
CONFIG_4KSTACK = n
Even with reverse patching the RedHat kernel, I could not get Nvidia to load up. In the end, I went to kernel.org and downloaded the source file for the 2.6.4 kernel, linux-2.6.4.tar.bz2. Installing this kernel was straight forward. Assuming that the above bz2 file is in the directory /usr/src, it consisted of the following steps:

bunzip2 linux-2.6.4.tar.bz2
tar xf linux-2.6.4.tar
cd linux-2.6.4
make mrproper
cp /boot/config-2.6.5-1.327 .config
make oldconfig

I just gave the default answers to all the questions. Unfortunately at this point, I was unable to effectively use either

make xconfig
or
make menuconfig

As such, I just edited the resulting .config file and made sure that I had the line:
CONFIG_REGPARMS = n
in the file. Note, the CONFIG_4KSTACKS is not an option in this kernel, but that is ok. I then built the kernel:

I also modified a few other kernel options to make sure that some additional features were working. The following three let me connect my Logitech USB camera to the computer:
CONFIG_USB_GADGET=m
CONFIG_USB_GADGET_NET2280=y
CONFIG_USB_NET2280=m

The following put NTFS support into the kernel.
CONFIG_NTFS_FS=m
CONFIG_NTFS_RW=y

The following allows me to write to the CDRW/DVD drive:
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_IDESCSI=m

make bzImage
make modules
make modules_install
make install

I then edited my /etc/grub.conf to make sure that the 2.6.4 kernel was the default, and rebooted the system. During boot, I encountered a number of what looked like worrisome messages, but in fact, they were not. Once you have booted, then you can install the NVIDIA drivers, I downloaded the file NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-5336-pkg1.run and installed it with the command:

sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-5336-pkg1.run

Once this is done, then you need to go into the /etc/X11 directory and modify the xorg.conf file. My version is here xorg.conf. The crucial lines are the
comment out the line:
#Load "dri"
and the lines:
Section "Device"
       Identifier "Videocard0"
       Driver "nvidia"
       VendorName "Videocard vendor"
       BoardName "driver (generic)"
       VideoRam 65536
       Option "NvAGP" "1"
#        Option "NoLogo" "true"
EndSection
If you do not like the NVIDIA logo to start up, you can uncomment the NoLogo line. At this point, you should be able to start up X:

init 5

You may get the following message, but it appears not to matter:

May 9 21:10:07 curtis kernel: nvidia: module license 'NVIDIA' taints kernel.

I also get messages both booting and shutting down about problems with the module floppy.o. Given that there is no floppy drive on this system, I am not worried, but may eventually figure out how to take care of this.

If you are happy, you can change our default login level from 3 to 5 by editing the /etc/inittab file.

I also had one oddity that occurred only once. When I rebooted the system, I came up in the original 800x600 resolution. It appears that the xorg.conf file was overwritten by the xorg.conf.backup file. After making both of these the the same new xorg.conf file, I never saw this problem again. At this point, I am happily using my system. I am not sure if everything is working, but enough is going that I am comfortable.

One potentially useful piece of information is that the hard reset button is the small hole in the bottom of the laptop next to the vent above the Windows sticker. I had one occasion to use this.

You can now clean up your kernel build by going into the kernel source directory and doing a

cd /usr/src/linux-2.6.4
cp .config /boot/config-2.6.4
make mrproper

I boot my kernel with the following lines in my grub.conf file. Note that I have disabled selinux at the kernel level. You may or may not want to do this, it is not necessary, but it cuts down on complaints during booting, shutdown and updating.

You may also want to uninstall the stock redhat stuff.

Display

Sound

USB

Memory Stick

ACPI

Things to do

modprobe sonypi

I lost my USB mouse, and when I logged out, the system hung. I may eventually look into this more carefully, but for now I am not too worried.