Sony VAIO PCG-C1XD

Slackware on a Sony VAIO PCG-C1XD

The PCG-C1XD is a very small Pentium II based laptop (I mean, really small). I have had access to one and the opportunity to install Linux on one (it's small enough that with a wireless card I believe I can make a very nice portable wireless access point).

I believe it varies only from other PCG-C1X's in the keyboard layout (the D is a German QWERTZ keyboard - as a non-German QWERTY user I find this very difficult to use!). You can therefore modify these instructions accordingly for your keyboard layout.

(Please note that this is a work in progress and will be updated as I work through setting up the laptop and have more details to hand.)

So far: The laptop boots, I've built a working 2.6 kernel for it, standby appears to work, and I've configured X (and managed to get KDE 3.4 running at a very reasonable speed).

Hardware

Output of lspci:

Coming Soon

Overview

Intel Mobile Pentium II 400MHz processor
128mb RAM
1024x480 LCD
NeoMagic Graphics Chip (1.5MB dedicated memory)
8GB Hard Drive
External PCMCIA CD-ROM Drive
External USB Floppy Drive (untested)
Yamaha sound chip
1 x IR port
1 x IEEE-1394 (Firewire) port
1 x USB port
1 x Sony proprietary port
1 x PCMCIA slot
1 x Camera (Built into top of laptop)

Working

Video Card: NeoMagic
Soundcard
Nib Mouse (Doesn't need a driver - does make strange sounds though)
CD-ROM (requires boot parameter)
Battery Status (See 'Battery' section below).

Not Tested, but probably works

Battery Status (I believe the battery with this laptop is dead)
Infra Red
VGA out
Function/Hot Keys (have not tried all though; extra configuration is probably required)

Does Not Work

Camera (There is a driver in the kernel for this, but I haven't tried it out)

Kernel Configuration

You don't need a particularly modern kernel to use this laptop, the default 2.4 series will work fine. For the challenge though, I have successfully built a 2.6 kernel.

As with all Sony VAIO laptops, you will need to select any options that refer to Sony (e.g. the sonypi module). Also, this is an APM based laptop, so no ACPI here.

Hardware Package and Software Dependencies

CD-Drive

To use the CD drive that comes with this laptop, you will need to add the following line when installing Slackware, and add it to the append line in LILO.

hd1=0x180,0x386

xorg.conf

Coming Soon - This laptop requires a custom mode line and a few other tweaks due to the very strange resolution of this screen.

Special Keys

There is a jogdial on this laptop, but it is untested as of the present.

Special Keys with X and kde

To be done.

Battery info via APM

To get the battery to display information, you will need to load APM. If you have APM as modules, you will need to load apm and start the APM daemon by hand, or create a startup script to do this for you.

Troubleshooting

Scrolling is too slow in a window manager

Drop the colours down to 16 bit in /etc/X11/xorg.conf

External Links/ References

Coming Soon