I have a little Sony Vaio VGN-T17GP laptop that I use for travelling, I bought it off ebay about a year ago for $1000 specifically to use when we go on holidays, as it only weighs 1.2kg, and it is very small, measuring just 272mm by 205mm. It has a 1.1GHz Pentium M processor, 1GB of RAM, a 40GB hard drive, a DVD burner, Wi-Fi, 2 USB ports, a PCMCIA port, a fire wire port, and the standard modem and Ethernet connections. To top it all off, the battery will last nearly 8 hours in low power mode. But it’s a few years old now, and it’s not the fastest laptop in the world, and so I decided that I would try to install Ubuntu 8.04 on it to speed it up a bit. Although I used to be an expert Unix user in a past life, it’s been years since I’d even looked at a Unix machine, and I’d only ever had limited exposure to Linux, so I’m approaching this installation almost as a newbie.
I did a Google search to see if anyone had done a Linux install onto a Sony Viao laptop like mine, but couldn’t find any references, so I decided to give it a go on my own
Installation
I downloaded the live CD from the Ubuntu website, burnt the .iso image to CD, then put the CD into my laptop and rebooted. Installation was very straight forward. I followed the guided setup to repartition my hard drive to include a Linux boot partition and a swap partition, answered a few other questions such as what country I live in, what sort of keyboard layout I use, what timezone I am in etc, and then the installation began, and in about 30 minutes, I had a fresh installation of Linux on my computer, ready to go! Microsoft take note! Installation does not have to be difficult!
Wireless (Wi-Fi) Networking
First job was to get the Wi-Fi configured to hook into my home network. I run WPA personal security on my home network instead of WPA2 personal because I have 3 access points at home, and one of them doesn’t support WPA2. So, I tried to get it to connect to my network using WPA2 Personal, but it just would not connect. I turned off security on one of my access points and was able to connect right away. I then set that access point to WPA2 Personal security, and was also able to connect straight away, but when I set the access point back to WPA personal, It just refused to connect. I played around with it for a while, and then found that if I manually set the encryption to “TKIP” instead of “Automatic”, it worked just fine!
Muted Audio
Next problem was that I had next to no sound. I couldn’t hear anything over the speakers, and only very very faint sound through the headphones. I did a quick Google search and found this blog post, which described how the default installation leaves a lot of inputs turned on, even if they are not physically present. So I just followed the instructions to turn off the extra unused inputs, and presto, sound worked just fine!
Installing Applications
One thing that deserves a mention is the Synaptic Package Manager, it makes package installation and updates just so simple and straight forward, just brilliant
Installing Google Applications
There are 2 applications from Google that I use every day, and not being able to use them on Linux would be a showstopper for me, but I was not disappointed.
The first app, Picasa2, offered me several methods, and I probably chose the most complex, but also probably the best. All I had to do was follow the instructions to use the Google linux repositories and then install the application through the synaptic package manager
I thought I would be able to install my second Google App, Google Earth, the same way, it I couldn’t find it. Instead, I went to the Google Earth page, pressed the download link, and it must have detected that I was running Linux, because it automatically offered me a file called GoogleEarthLinux.bin. I just saved this to my desktop, opened a terminal session, changed to my desktop directory, and run “sh GoogleEarthLinux.bin”, and it installed Google Earth for me. Brilliant!
Suspend and Hibernate
I found that I could get Suspend to work, but most of the time, I prefer to use Hibernate, but try as I might, I couldn’t not get it to work, seems to be a very common problem. I did some looking around on Google again, and found this blog post about using another application called “uswsusp” to take care of it. I followed the instructions on that page, and I now have hiberbation working as it should!
Things left to do
I just have a couple of things left that I need to get working. The first is to get the AT&T Network Client configured so that I can connect into my work network and read my email. I have got it installed, but I can’t get it to connect. The windows version of the client has a lot more configurable items, some of which must be configured before it will connect, but I haven;t yet found how to configure those items on the Linux version, still working on it
The next thing that I have to do is get my Telstra NextG wireless network card (MF332) working so that I can connect whereever I am. I found a few guides on the net and have tried a few different methods, but have not had any success yet, I will post again when I do