The Sony Vaio VGN-Z11WN/B is a beautiful and powerful laptop. It would be a shame to waste it by using a closed and proprietary operating system. Unfortunately, a few tricks are needed to save it from the dark side by installing a Linux distribution on it. This page tries to document my ongoing effort to install Fedora 10 on the VGN-Z11WN/B.
Let's start with good news: no trick is needed to get a quite good system. The goal of this document is only to reach a perfect install, if this is possible. Information about related Sony models can be found in the following pages:
Sony seems to use different references in different countries. In France, my laptop is Vaio VGN-Z11WN/B. It seems that this reference is also used in e.g. the UK. I'm not sure what is the reference of this model in the USA. The closest one I found in VGN-Z550N/B which has mostly the same specification apart the screen resolution.
The hardware is the following one:
I've first built the recovery DVDs for Windows Vista. I don't plan to use them, but after all, my lab paid for the licence, so... Then I've made a fresh install (wiping everything out) from the x86_64 DVD, with an encrypted /home partition. Everything went on smoothly.
As always I've installed additional packages, in particular yum-fastestmirror to avoid waiting ages for packages to download, but all in one, the laptop was already fully usable with no configuration after the install.
The touchpad is supported out of the box, but is also configured to use a very low speed, which makes it barely usable (too my mind). Interactive configuration is possible via gsynaptics, but the shared memory option must be added to Xorg config file. Interestingly, Fedora 10 did not install any configuration file on my laptop. I generated a simple one via system-config-display and edited it to remove the mode section (which was broken).
The I added the following section
Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad" Driver "synaptics" Option "Device" "/dev/psaux" Option "Protocol" "auto-dev" Option "SHMConfig" "true" EndSection
as well as this line to the "ServerLayout" section:
InputDevice "Synaptics Touchpad" "AlwaysCore"
and restarted X. With my previous laptop, a Dell Latitude D430, gsynaptics was not really useful and I had to perform long tests to obtain a correct configuration. With the vaio, I just had to set the minimum speed to something correct (0.91 according to synclient -l) and the touchpad was perfectly usable. A drawback of using gsynaptics rather than putting the configuration in the Xorg config file is that the login screen uses the default configuration (and therefore a very low speed).
Apart from the sound control keys (Fn+F2, ,Fn+F3 and Fn+F4), the interesting special keys (in particular Fn+F5 and Fn+F6 for brightness control) do not work. They simply don't generate any event at the kernel log level or at X11 level.
The solution should come from the sony-laptop module, which is loaded by Fedora, but some investigations are clearly needed (see also here).