Sony Vaio GR370

[stingray72]

I am about to purchase myself a new Sony Vaio GR370 Laptop. Specs on the machine can be seen at:

http://www.sonystyle.com/vaio/popup/specs_gr370.pdf

Anyway, I'm enjoying playing with Gentoo so much on my AMD-K6/2 500 machine that I thought I'd go ahead and install it on this machine. I've been a RedHat / Debian user as long as I've been work w/ linux and am just getting into Gentoo.

Anyway, my concern is the installation on a laptop. More to the point, what to look out for? I checked http://www.linux-laptop.net and a GR370 had not been submitted yet and was wondering if anyone else had installed Gentoo on a similar machine. If so, what problems were encountered??

I'm planning on using the machine for watching DVD's, maybe burning CD's, An office suite (open office for Grad school) and general internet browsing.

Any insight would be welcome. Thanks in advance

[ltchalupa]

I installed Gentoo on my Sony Vaio laptop just recently. While it's not a GR370(It's one of the FX series), it looks like you might run into some of the same problems I did.

There's a good change that you'll have an EtherExpressPro compatable ethernet adapter. The default Linux driver(eepro100) works just fine for this normally, but I ran into problems with mine when I connected it to a 10baseT connection. The easiest fix for this is to get the drivers from Intel at http://support.intel.com/support/go/linux/e100.htm

I've not seen any warnings of problems with USB on the GR series, but there's a problem in the FX series. If you do have problems, there's information at http://www.pm.waw.pl/~jslupski/vaio/usbproblem.html

I've not tried watching DVDs, but my CD-burner worked just fine once I compiled SCSI emulation into the kernel and setup the drive to emulate SCSI(I can't remember off the top of my head where to do this, I think there might be help for that under the Kernel option for SCSI emulation).

I've not tried using sound on mine yet, everything I've seen so far says to use the alsa drivers for it. I've also not tried the modem, but I hear the company has released a linux driver, and you can probably find it somewhere around http://www.linux-laptop.net

Hope this helps you out..