APM on Sony Vaio

[Seb Wills]

Hi,

Just installed Ubuntu on a Sony Vaio PCG-Z600NE laptop. Everything worked 
beautifully (congratulations to the developers on putting together a great 
distribution!) except:

1. I had to add
   Option "SWCursor" "true"
to the neomagic Driver section in XF86Config-4 to avoid screen corruption 
around the mouse pointer.

2. Power management. I'm hoping someone can help me with this.

ACPI doesn't get enabled as the BIOS is older than 2001. If I insert the 
apm module, it correctly reports battery status etc., but I can't get 
suspend/standby to work. "apm --standby" does nothing other than leave a 
syslog message "kernel: apm: standby: Unable to enter requested state". 
"apm --suspend" does put the laptop to sleep, but when I wake it up the 
system freezes with a blank screen. I've tried this from a text console as 
well as from X. I've also tried adding "acpi=off apm" to the end of the 
kernel boot command line - no difference.

Previously I had Debian woody on this laptop (with a 2.4 kernel). APM 
suspend and standby both worked perfectly (the latter invoking the BIOS 
suspend-to-disk procedure). Any suggestions to get this working under 
Ubuntu would be very welcome.

Another issue is that the "Fn" hotkeys (to suspend, hibernate, change 
screen brightness etc) don't do anything. I know on some Vaios these 
require software drivers such as the "sonypi" kernel module. But I think 
they should work with BIOS alone on my Vaio, since they worked fine with 
my woody installation, without any special drivers. (I've also tried 
loading the sonypi module on my Ubuntu system: that makes no difference).

Thanks

seb