UBUNTU 5.10 (BREEZY BADGER) ON A SONY VAIO VGN-FS315B
UBUNTU 5.10 (BREEZY BADGER) ON A SONY VAIO VGN-FS315B
The installation is very easy and doesn't require any special advice. I
installed it in a formated hard disk and as the unique operating system
(I don't like Windows or any other) so I can't help you if your would
want to have some other operating system. At the first time many
devices are working: the wireless, the display (even the resolution is
well configured to 1280x800) so I'll only talk about thing that didn't
worked fine and I have to change.
Sound
The sound is detected properly and the HDA Intel (Alsa Mixer)
Driver is used. The problem is that, if you try to hear something
you will hear nothing: this is not a problem of the driver but only of
the volume. To fix this, open your volume control icon in the upper
right corner of the desktop and edit the preference so you can see all
this volume controls:
Raise to the maximum all the volume controls (specially PCM, Front and
PC Speaker) and everything will sound fine.
DVD
The DVD is detected properly but the DMA is not active by default and
thus you can have problems playing and recording dvds and cds. To
overcome edit the file
/etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh and add hdparm -d1 /dev/hdb
after the line that contains
[ -f /etc/default/rcS ] && . /etc/default/rcS
Every time you boot your computer you will have your DVD DMA activated.
Touchpad
After
the installation the touchpad is configured as an emulation of a PS/2
mouse, so it doesn't have any vertical/horizontal scroll ability or any
other configurable features. The first thing that you have to do
is install the latest version of the
synaptic driver from http://web.telia.com/~u89404340/touchpad/
Once installed, we can manage the touchpad as a real touchpad (not
anymore a PS/2 mouse). The way to do this is to edit the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf and add/modify
the lines in bold:
# /etc/X11/xorg.conf (xorg X Window System server configuration
file)
#
# This file was generated by dexconf, the Debian X Configuration tool,
using
# values from the debconf database.
#
# Edit this file with caution, and see the /etc/X11/xorg.conf manual
page.
# (Type "man /etc/X11/xorg.conf" at the shell prompt.)
#
# This file is automatically updated on xserver-xorg package upgrades
*only*
# if it has not been modified since the last upgrade of the xserver-xorg
# package.
#
# If you have edited this file but would like it to be automatically
updated
# again, run the following command:
# sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg
The parameters I have
selected work very fine for me but you can change them as you like. For
example, in some applications like browser the horizontal scrollbar can
be annoying and you can disable it by setting
Option "HorizScrollDelta" "0" But take into acount that you'll disable it the
horizontal scrollbar for all the applications!
FN Keys
The first thing that you have to do is to install two packages which
gives us graphical bars for the volume and bright levels. The packages
are xosd and xosd-devel; execute the following command to install them: sudo apt-get install xosd-devel xosd Afterwards you have to download the fsfn driver, which is the
driver that enables the FN keys, from
http://download.berlios.de/fsfn/fsfn-1.0.tar.gz then execute the
following commands: tar xvfz fsfn-1.0.tar.gz cd fsfn-1.0 ./configure make sudo make install
Copy the program to a typical binary directory
cp fsfn /usr/local/bin/
We have to start the fsfn in each boot, so we are going to do similar
thing that with the DMA activation. Edit the file /etc/init.d/bootmisc.sh and add
/usr/local/bin/fsfn
after the line that contains
[ -f /etc/default/rcS ] && . /etc/default/rcS
With each boot the FN keys daemon will start running, so the
mute, volume up/down and brightness up/down will work. If we want the
above mentioned graphical interface (why we needed the xosd packages)
we have to go to
system menu -> preferences -> sessions -> startup programs
and add the following command
fsfn -o
Every time you log into your X you'll find a graphical bar like this:
By editing the file /etc/fsfn.conf you can configure
more keys in a file with this format (type man 5 fsfn for more
information). For example if you want to enable hibernation (fn + f12)
you should have a file like this:
The Ubuntu Breezy Badger distro configures properly almost al devices
of the laptop, much better than other distros that I've tried. In this
help page, some minor patches are explained. If you don't understand
any procedure and/or want more help with this laptop model don't
hesitate to write me an e-mail.
Manuel Cebrian
e-mail: xxxmanuelcebrianramosxxx.gmail.com (remove the two xxx triplets
to send me an e-mail).
March, 2006
