Linux on Sony Vaio C1NX ?

[almesber en lrc.di.epfl.ch]

Thomas Waldmann wrote:
> Does somebody out there use a C1NX ?

Yep. You may find some of the information in
http://icawww1.epfl.ch/~almesber/C1.notes
useful. (As the name says, these are just the notes I took while
fighting with the machine.)

> Does linux kernel and related tools support
> - the [unknown] USB chipset in it ?

Apparently yes, but as far as I can tell, recent kernels just produce
various flavours of crashes or complaints when trying to access the
floppy. I think this is expected behaviour of the USB code so far.

> - the [unknown] firewire chipset in it ?

I've read that Linux Firewire doesn't support this chip (yet ?). So
the relevant people seem to know ;-)

> - the [unknown] sound chip in it ?

Sound Blaster, io 0x220, irq 5, dma 1, dma16 3, mpu 0x320, mpu irq -1.
The SB emulation is rather poor, but it's good enough for games and to
show off with some MP3s.

> - the [unknown] IrDa chip in it ?

Apparently the SMC thing, but I haven't had any success with it yet.
(Tried SMC and irtty.)

> - SONY MPEG-1 (is this a hardware MPEG device or some MPEG-SW ?)

Either software or part of the frame grabber chip, I'd say.

> - the camera (attached via some [unknown] bus or chip) ?

Yes, it's made by Kawasaki Steel corporation. They told me they'll
release programming material in February.

> Does XFree86 support the [unknown] graphics chip ?

Of course. Just get a recent distribution. You may have to manually
adjust the resolution to 1024x480, though.

> If anybody has informations on the chips and/or whether they run with Linux
> or not, please tell me - I don´t wanna buy a $$$$ computer just to find out 
> that it maybe doesn´t run Linux well.

It's a very fine Linux machine. If you can live without USB, Firewire,
the jog dial (probably something PS/2-ish, but I didn't dig any further),
IrDA, and the camera for now, I'd recommend it. (I'm using Ethernet and
WaveLAN to transfer data, so I don't need USB.) I'd expect USB to work
quite soon. We'll see about the camera. Not sure about IrDA and Firewire.

My main complaint about the machine is that it only runs for about 1.5h
on batteries. I'm not sure if this is a battery limitation, a system
tuning issue (well, the hard disk should definitely spin up less
frequently), or a defect of my machine. I should get an extended battery
cell in a while, then I'll know more.

- Wermer

-- 
  _________________________________________________________________________
 / Werner Almesberger, ICA, EPFL, CH       werner.almesberger en ica.epfl.ch /
/_IN_N_032__Tel_+41_21_693_6621__Fax_+41_21_693_6610_____________________/

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