ATTENTION All VAIO OWNERS!

A couple of days ago IntuitiveNipple started a new thread on the Ubuntu forums. He’s started working with Mattia Dongili on the Sony Notebook Control/Sony PI sony-laptop driver for the Linux kernel, to try & improve support for the following Sony VAIO laptop features..

Fn keys, screen dimmer, bluetooth, wireless LAN power, suspend/resume & VMX (VT).

If you want to improve Ubuntu/Linux support for VAIO laptops (not just the FS versions), they need as many people as possible to follow this tutorial & submit their results.

Please help out! It’s not hard to do & the results could help to bring about huge improvements in the way that Linux operating systems work with Sony VAIO hardware.

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The first thing that we need to do is find out what version of the BIOS your laptop is using. You can see your BIOS version by pressing F2 as the PC starts & entering the BIOS itself (might be the Esc key on non FS models?).

It should be shown on the very first screen of your BIOS setup menu..

It’s the top line that you need to take notice of & write down. As you can see from the screenshot, mine says BIOS Version: R0040J1.

To exit the BIOS without changing any of your settings, press the Left Arrow key to get to the Exit menu, then press the Down Arrow key to select Discard Changes & Exit, & then press the Enter/Return key to restart your laptop.

Once your laptops restarted & you’ve logged back into your desktop, you will need to install & run a simple ACPI utility. Open up a terminal & enter the following Bold lines (one at a time)..

cd Desktop

sudo apt-get install acpidump

sudo acpidump -b -t DSDT -o FileName

tar -czvf FileName.tar.gz FileName

sudo rm FileName.dsdt

You must replace FileName with your laptop model & BIOS version. To make things easier for the Ubuntu developers to analyse the results, please format the name of the file according to this scheme..

SERIES-MODEL-BIOSVERSION.dsdt

EXAMPLE: Mine is the VGN series of VAIO laptop, model FS215E with BIOS version R0040J1, so I need to name my file VGN-FS215E-R0040J1.dsdt.

Check out the image below to see an example of how your terminal should look. I didn’t use the install command, as I already had the software on my system..

Now you can attach the archive file from your desktop (the tar.gz file) to a reply on the original forum thread & it can be downloaded by IntuitiveNipple/Mattia for dissection & comparison.

Once the developers have this information, bug fixing will become a lot easier & hopefully it won’t be too long before Ubuntu can set up your FN keys etc. automatically on install. This information could go a long way to helping the developers sort out a lot of the other VAIO problems too, not just on Ubuntu but all open source operating systems.

Thanks for helping