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Date:      Mon, 13 Nov 2000 10:57:45 -0800 (PST)
From:      Nick Sayer <nsayer@quack.kfu.com>
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Sony VAIO Z505JE & FreeBSD
Message-ID:  <200011131857.eADIvjJ40302@medusa.kfu.com>

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I just bought a Vaio 505 and thought I would share my experiences in getting
it working so that the next time someone searches the archives to see if it
will work or not (like I did), they can see this. :-)

I installed 4.1.1-RELEASE on it. The installation was fairly straightforward.
It was a little tricky figuring out pccard at that stage, so I just used the
built-in fxp0 to get the box up and running.

The pccard trouble turned out to be that aparently polling (irq pcic0 0) the
slot doesn't work. It does on my old Dell, so I'm unclear on what the problem
might be. Setting the slot to irq 11 instead appears to work, and irq 3 is
still free for the card. Having done that, my wi card took over and worked
just fine.

The sound is a Yamaha DS-1E, which works until you suspend the machine.
It appears that 4.2-RELEASE will have some stuff in that driver that may
fix the problem. I am sup'ping the release candidate at the moment.

XFree86 4.0.1 doesn't recognize the video by itself. I found I had to goose
it a little. Adding "Chipset neo2200" and 'option "sw_cursor"' made X come
up without difficulty. I haven't tried an external monitor. 'apm -d 0'
doesn't work on this laptop, unfortunately, but closing the lid turns off
the backlight and doesn't suspend the machine, so that is an adequate fix.

The touchpad is PS/2, of course. One tricky part is that it is an ALPS Glide-
point, which means that if you want the tap gestures to work, you need to
specify moused_type="glidepoint" in your rc.conf. This will generate a warning
message from moused when you start it, but using "ps/2" makes the tap
gestures not work. The man page suggests remapping button 4 to 1 might be
another workaround. I haven't tried that. Of course X just sees
/dev/sysmouse and is happy as a clam.

The USB floppy works just fine. You need to add some extra stuff to
usbd.conf to get it to work automatically:

device "Y-E DATA FlashBuster-U"
	vendor  0x057b
	product 0x0000
	release 0x0304
	attach "/sbin/camcontrol rescan bus 0"

The floppy shows up as /dev/da0 when it's plugged in. Be sure and turn
off "plug-n-play os" in the BIOS to get the USB controller to show up.

When the kernel is properly decked out, there are 3 unknown PCI devices
detected:

8039104d        iLINK (firewire) controller
808a104d        Sony (Memory stick controller?)
244314f1        Conexant (modem?)

Clearly the modem is a winmodem and thus probably will never work. All
of my media devices use CF cards, so I don't really care about the
stupid memory stick thing. Likewise, I don't have any firewire devices
at the moment.

APM appears to work reasonably. It reports charging state and battery
remaining both in time and percentages. It suspends and resumes nicely,
although the Fn+F12 suspend to disk doesn't work. I haven't investigated
why this might be, but suspect that I would need to make a
suspend-to-disk partition for it to work under FreeBSD. I bet I will
find a copy of phdisk.exe on the Windows side somewhere.

The only mystery remaining is the jog dial. It would have been the
easiest thing in the world for them to simply make this a USB "mouse
wheel" (along with making the trackpad USB instead of PS/2 -- saving us
all an IRQ in the process), but they didn't.

I have had a bias against Sony products for a number of years. This is
because every Sony product since 1992 that I bought had defects both in
design and manufacturing that made them garbage. This machine has
already somewhat improved my opinion of Sony, and may in the end turn it
around completely. It's still early, but so far I am quite happy.



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