HOWTO - Ubuntu on Sony Laptop

Installing Ubuntu on a Sony Laptop

I was given a laptop from my work, with a version of CentOS, a Red Hat derivative; which worked fine until I turned it in to be upgraded. Our support person, Elizabeth, had done a good job making these things workable in the first place, and had to install special Nvidia kernel and wireless drivers. However, my experience with Red Hat / Fedora core has been that you can update the packages easy enough, but to upgrade to a new version the best approach has always been to reformat the hard drive and start from scratch loading the full complement of applications from the installation CDs. I even created a set of scripts to document and automate the configuration of the main server (NIS, NFS, postgreSQL, apache, etc.), and the client machines, which were little more than lightweight X11 terminals.

I dropped off the Red Hat / Fedora core train, when I attempted to go from Fedora core 2 to Fedora core 4 on the main server. However, I found it to be an uphill battle getting all the pieces working, until I discovered some unsatisfied dependencies. It was just too much work. The solution was to just to put back the original hard drive and run with FC2 until the drive suffered hardware failures. At that time, it looked like Ubuntu was the new darling of the distributions. I tried it, downloaded and configured with the services I wanted. Each installation becomes highly specialized in this way. However, once configured upgrades are easy. Things just work!

Instead of trying to restore my laptop to the "working" version prior to the upgrade, which eliminated my wireless capability, I tried installing Ubuntu on it. Here are the results.

The versions

1. Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake)
2. Sony Vaio VGN-S580P laptop
3. NVIDIA GeForce Go 6400 (1280x800)
4. Integrated wireless - IEEE 802.11b, IEEE 802.11g

Took a another 2.5in SATA drive and partitioned it with fdisk to my preferred layout. I did this externally on another computer with an USB/Sata cable, it probably could have been done via the installation process.

partition	type	size (GB)	mount
1	ext2	5	/boot
2	swap	2	swap
3	ext3	30	/
4	extended
5	ext3	20	/var
6	ext3	40	/home

I installed the new 2.5in hard drive, so I could back out to something if everything failed miserably. However, this wasn't necessary.

The laptop boots just fine from the Ubuntu CD, but the splash screen "looks" funny with some imperfect color mappings. This prompted me to try to install with the "safe" graphics mode. This worked well enough, but once installed the display could only see about 800x600 of the 1280x800 display real estate. Loading and enabling the nvidia-glx package only caused the X11 display to disappear. The /etc/X11/xorg.conf display driver went from "vesa" to "nvidia". The "vesa" was not was expected.

Tried again by booting up again with the install CD. This time I stayed with the regular install (not safe graphics mode). The install display looked odd in that only the left portion of the screen was visible, but shifted to the right. However, there was enough of the screen visible to proceed. This turned out to be OK. Once everything was installed and the laptop rebooted, the NVidia splash screen came up as expected, as well as the _em(gdm) login screen in the full 1280x800 resolution. After logging in and inspecting the network configuration with ifconfig, route -n, and iwconfig. The wireless connection came up without any problems!

Proceeded to configure the laptop to my needs. Some of which are the following packages:

1. edit /etc/apt/sources.list (use the universe). (add deb http://oss.oracle.com/debian unstable main non-free)
2. nvidia-glx - run 'nvidia-glx-config enable' which should change the /etc/X11/xorg.conf driver from "nv" to "nvidia"
3. openssh-server - edit /etc/ssh/ssh_config
4. tcsh
5. dosbox
6. autoconf
7. m4
8. autotools-dev
9. gettext-doc
10. gcc
11. g77
12. gcc-docs
13. dejagnu
14. tclN.N tclN.N-dev tclN.N-doc
15. tclxN.N tclxN.N-dev tclxN.N-doc
16. tkN.N tkN.N-dev tkN.N-doc
17. dpkg-dev
18. make
19. kernel-package
20. cvs
21. oracle-xe