Sony Vaio S1XP info

[James Blackwell]

On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 03:10:09PM +1000, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> Interesting page from Bastien about the Sony Vaio S1XP, which will further
> inform our Totally Rad Laptop Support. :-)
> 
>   http://www.hadess.net/vaio.php3
> 

Odd that you mention Sony Vaios.  On this new vaio VGN-A190, things are
very good, with a couple small exceptions:

There's a new viao out (VGN-A190). A rather nice laptop that comes with
a docking station and speakers. Some points though: 

1. In order for the speakers on the docking station to work, the bitrate
of the sound server needs to be fixed at 48000hz. I wasn't able to force
this (or any) rate with esd, though I am able to do so now with arts (yes,
I'm running kde on ubuntu)

2. This vaio needs hacks to the sonypi driver that are in 2.6.8 but not in
2.6.7. Without sonypi, you're unable to change the backlight. Luckily, if
you set the backlight to max in windows, you can get along pretty well.

3. Though Fabio may have fixed it by this point, this laptop has a native
resolution of 1920x1200, a setting that is not available during dexconf.

4. As with all recent laptops, the onboard wireless is a ipw2200.

5. No free software 3d acceleration (2d accel is ok) with the ATI
Mobility Radeon 9700.

6. There is an mixer option named "IEC958 Playback AC97-SPSA" which
effectively works as an on/off switch for the docking station sound. I
don't think there's a gnome mixer that handles this (though the kde mixer
applet handles it)

7. The automatic cpu throttlers (cpudyn, cpufreq) don't seem to work? 


On the whole though, *very* solid. No problems with the keyboard, sound,
usb, or anything that really matters. dexconf figured out it was an ati
with no problem, and was even able to get a "close" mapped resolution that
was of course slightly blury, but very useable.



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James Blackwell          Try something fun: For the next 24 hours, give
Smile more!              each person you meet a compliment!

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