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.

Ubuntu Natty Beta on Sony Vaio CS17

I am posting some screenshots of natty beta running on my sony vaio CS 17.

What works: Unity looks great, works after installing nvidia additional drivers.
                       Fn keys for volume work out of the box.

 Hiccups:     Brightness keys do not work, will try to tweak with nvclock.
                    Media keys do not work, pressing media keys brings up right
                    click menu.
                    Touchpad randomly stops responding and makes the box
                    unusable needing reboot.

will post in detail after i use it for a while...
                    

Solution to noisy fan issue on Sony Vaio CS

A few months back i wrote on this blog, how to rectify the noisy fan issue of Vaio CS17G. Look here.
Even though the noise reduced considerably, i still got a faint noise intermittently.

I decided to partition my hard disk and install ubuntu. Installed ubuntu 10.4 or lucid lynx and am running it since its beta release. Its been more than a month now and i am very much impressed with this new release. So much so that most of the times i am running ubuntu and i hardly ever needed to revert back to my vista partition. I might have done so only two times in a month.

I have noticed a peculiar thing that whenever i am running ubuntu i never get this noisy fan on this laptop. But if i revert back to vista, within 30 mins this intermittent fan noise starts.
Why this happens?
Because ubuntu runs at a lower temperature than vista on this machine, about 3 to 4 degrees less of CPU temp. It keeps below 50 degrees most of the times. But it is  >50 degrees most of the times, if i am running vista.
This could be the reason.
So if you want a permanent solution to the fan noise on Vaio CS it might help, if you switch to Ubuntu.

Ubuntu lucid lynx 10.4 on Vaio CS17G

Its nearly a week since the release of ubuntu lucid lynx or ubuntu 10.4. I upgraded when it was still beta and now i have fully updated lynx. On my vaio cs17g, i was hoping it will fix few specific glitches with this laptop. see my previous blog for this.
So does anything change? Not really
Although there are a lot of improvements over ubuntu 9.10 like,

• Faster boot time: some guys claim to have a boot time of less than 10 secs, i get around 15 secs till Login screen.
• Improved appearances: in the sense, better default themes, i like dust sand, ambience
• Introduction of "me menu" which i feel is a very nice idea.

In terms of addressing my specific problems pertaining to this laptop, no much change.

• suspend does not work: it suspends well but no keyboard on wake up
• Inbuilt microphone does not work
• Media keys do not work

I managed to get the brightness key working after tweaking and getting them to work with nvclock.

Apart from these glitches i feel it is a great improvement over the previous release.

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.