Get the beautiful ubuntu natty running on your Vaio CS laptops

Its been a week since Ubuntu natty got officially released. I was running natty since when it was alpha. Since i had issues like the touch-pad freezes, and also since i wanted try the gnome-shell and screwed the install, i decided to do a fresh install.

These are the steps i went through to get a beautiful natty 32bit running on my sony vaio CS17G.

1. Installation: Download Ubuntu natty free from the Ubuntu site, here.
                         Burn the ISO file with a ISO burning software to a CD.
                         Boot with the CD into a live session, to test it, for me i was booted to a Ubuntu classic desktop, without unity. everything worked fine.
                     
                        Go ahead and press on install Ubuntu, If you have partitioned hard disk with gparted, you may run into the issue of installation getting stuck at copying files stage, for ever.

                        So while installing to partitions done with gparted, selecting formatting option, overcomes this problem and installation proceeds without a hitch.

2. Reboot:       After the successful installation, you will be prompted to reboot. I landed in trouble again when natty refused to boot and it stops permanently with a black screen and a cursor on the top left corner. I had to boot with kernel options noacpi nolapic. This resulted in a successful boot into a natty ubuntu classic desktop with a message that unity is not possible because of driver issues.
                     
                        The fresh install without the nvidia proprietary drivers results only in Ubuntu classic Desktop without unity. But the Fn keys work very well, both for volume and brightness, and the AV Mode key brings up Banshee media player.

3. Nvidia:       If you want unity desktop you have to install nvidia drivers. Go to additional drivers option, which will search for the available nvidia drivers, install nvidia current form the available drivers, reboot.

4. Unity:       I was rebooted to a beautiful natty desktop with unity running. But i lost the Fn key for brightness after installing the nvidia drivers. Volume keys worked fine. Av key stopped working. To make brightness keys work again, i had to install nvclock.  Look here for the instructions on how to make this work.

5. Updates:  Install all the available updates. Also install some of the essentials, like ubuntu-restricted-extras from the ubuntu software center. Also install most useful apps like vlc, conky, chromium, gimp, cheese etc. Look here.

6. Conky:   To get a beautiful conky, shown in the screenshot above, look here for instructions.

7. Suspend: Suspend works well, haven't tested hibernate yet. But the problem is that when you wake from suspend you will loose the keyboard. For this i had to use atkbd.reset option to the kernel while booting. This mitigates the problem of loosing your keyboard after suspend.
                    So my kernel options while booting are i8042.nopnp noacpi nolapic atkbd.reset.
                    I found that these options make my vaio cs work reasonably well.

8. Kernel:   Without noacpi nolapic kernel options it will not boot many a times, though it boots without these options, randomly one in 5 to 6 tries.
                   i8042 option seems to help with the touchpad craziness. It seems have stopped the freezes and make touchpad more usable.
                   atkbd.reset is required for the no keyboard after suspend issues.

You might not have the touchpad at the login screen with atkbd.reset option, use keyboad to login. On reaching the desktop press alt+F2, select terminal, and from the terminal do
                  sudo modprobe psmouse.


Randomly touchpad might act weird especially after waking up from suspend, for that do
                 sudo rmmod psmouse

                 sudo modprobe psmouse

9. Camera: Webcam works only with the cheese webcam booth.

10. So now you have a beautiful, stable, working Ubuntu natty running on your Sony Vaio CS laptop.
cheers!!

Finally, got back the brightness control in windows 7 on my Vaio CS17

Had a tough time trying to get the brightness control to work after installing windows 7 on my Vaio CS17G, which came with vista originally installed.Every time i pressed the Fn+F5 or Fn+F6 the display bar moved by one block, but there was no change in the brightness. Windows mobility centre didn’t have the brightness option.

Finally got hold of the correct driver upgrade version from the Sony Australia, which did the job. 
Windows 7 Upgrade NVIDIA Graphics Driver Upgrade Version 8.15.11.8640
This program will upgrade NVIDIA Graphics Driver to version 8.15.11.8640.
Although it says that this is applicable only to VGN-CS36GJ, VGN-CS38GD, VGN-CS36TJ, VGN-CS36MJ, VGN-CS37GH, VGN-CS28GD, VGN-CS36SJ, VGN-CS27GJ: it worked without a hitch for me on my Vaio CS17G.

Now i have brightness changing with Fn keys and also on power on/off and i have brightness control from windows mobility centre as well.

Download the driver from here.

Finally suspend works on Sony Vaio CS running Ubuntu 10.04

Yes finally got suspend to work on my Sony Vaio CS, running Ubuntu 10.04 64 bit edition.

• sudo gedit /etc/default/grub. Look for the line GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash" and change it to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash atkbd.reset". Save it.
• sudo update-grub.
• Reboot.
• Now when you want to suspend, if you have a SD Card mounted, unmount it first.
• Suspend should work now. cheers.

Ubuntu 9.10 on Sony Vaio VGN-CS17G

Hi, a little more than a month left now for the release of Ubuntu Lucid lynx i,e 10.04. I have been using ubuntu for the last 5 years,earlier on my previous sony vaio PGN-K115Z and now on my new vaio CS17G for the past 6 months. I have tried hard to get the most of my lappy in ubuntu. It is the time to list what has worked and what did'nt, since i want to move to ubuntu lucid beta ASAP.

What did'nt work:
1. Inbuilt microphone
2. Suspend works but no keyboard on waking up.
3. Media keys do not work.

What works:
1. Fn keys for volume control works including mute, up and down out of the box.
2. Fn brightness keys worked after tweaking, to get them work with nvclock
3. Inbuilt webcam works with cheese but not with camorama.
4. wifi works out of the box
5. Hibernate works out of the box.
6. Headphones work

Most of the other things worked.
For me, the one which caused much trouble was suspend. It is anoying to hibernate, as it takes more time to wake up than booting time. So you can actually shut down and boot everytime faster than hibernate

I have heard that the new kernel in lucid has rectified the problem of suspend. That is good news and that it is very fast in booting i,e under 10 secs boot.

I will report back when i install lucid beta on this machine.

Reduce Loud Rattling sony vaio CS fan noise

Update: 3 months since my post on reducing the fan noise. The noise seems to reappear. I took apart my vaio CS again to peep inside and try to figure out what exactly is the problem. I found that there is a lot of wobble when the fan rotates which makes the blades to brush the edges. So i came up with this.
Take a smooth surfaced plastic washer and stick it to the base of the center rod in the fans, like this in the photo. Look at the arrows to see how the washer is stuck to the base of the fan. After this put everything back as before. Now the fan noise is very minimal as the wobbling reduces to a great extent and the fan runs smoothly. For full article look below.

                                                                 

Hi it has been nearly 10 months since i started using vaio CS17G, it is an excellent laptop running vista without problems thus far. But since yesterday i started getting a strange loud fan noise all of a sudden.
I could follow the temp readings and the noise came on as soon as the temp was nearing 50C.
After googling for a while i learnt that this is a common problem with the sony laptops and was attributed to the faulty fans manufactured in china which were used by sony for their laptops.
I could go for repairs from sony under warranty, but for many people the problem returned after the repairs.
Since i had also partitioned the hard disk and installed ubuntu, i was not sure of warranty.
So i decided i will fix this on my own.
So these are the steps to reach the fan and fix the problem.

1. Disconnect power cable after shutdown and remove battery.