Experiences with Sony VAIO VGN-FE550G - anyone have gentoo?

[Ian G]

Hi Guys,

The time has come to purchase a new laptop as I'm sick of having to borrow the windows one from work and have to boot a livecd to get back into *nix. I've check round some of the linux laptop sites and I can't find any info for this specific version.

I have been offered a Sony VAIO VGN-FE550G laptop for what seems like a great price and I was just wondering if its a good choice considering I want to dual boot between gentoo and 'some other clunky non *nix OS'

Core Duo cpu so I guess its just a case of enabling SMP in the kernel. I've not had intel cpus for a while but I'm guessing this one will be up to the job of mobile computing.

There are a few bad things in the spec that I see

* shared memory graphics using an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950. I know this isn't as good as a dedicated pci-express card but as its a development on the move tool I'm not so fussed as I'm not interested in games - it just has to run gnome and eclipse really at its max 1280x800 resolution.

I've always built my gentoo installs from the ground up - but with this one I may try then install from the latest liveCD image and see what happens.

Do you think this would be a 'reasonable' choice for gentoo?
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Regards

Ian.

[Ian G]

Any more thoughts on this folks ?

I have to decide if I'm gonna get this in the next few days - may just take the plunge and then document my findings incase anyone else gets one.
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Regards

Ian.

[BRPXQZME]

In the end it's ultimately what you want, but I want to get revenge against my VAIO (it's a P4. It runs at 76 degrees centigrade with a loud fan on at all times it's doing something) and say that the specs on the one you're considering are in some ways better and in some ways worse than my MacBook (in other words, comparable). If the CPU speed doesn't bother you (uh, it's a Core Duo laptop so those extra megahertz aren't that necessary) then I'd say this one isn't necessarily a bad choice (as long as you aren't attempting to play HL2 or something on the Windows partition).

Two things to really watch out for: VAIO's are kind of ucky when it comes to knowing exactly what kind of hardware is being used (I know I had a lot of fun with kernel configs and spending hours looking for the right drivers, although I guess if I had to do it again I'd know what to expect now). 2-4 hours of battery life? All depends on how you use it, so either get two batteries or keep a careful eye on the power usage.

Oh, and in the kernel, just turn on SMP and multi-core scheduler. The safe CFLAGS are "-O2 -march=prescott -pipe -fomit-frame-pointer" because the Core series has SSE3 but not EM64T. Also, Core series does not have HTT, so don't turn on SMT.
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[Ian G]

Thanks for your insight.

Yup - this isn't going to be some mobile games monster. Its purely to help me whilst out and about from the office and give me a nice mobile development environment, I dare say it will get used for watching the odd movie on hotel stop overs.

Since I built my 2nd gentoo machine (amd64-based shuttle SN25P) Its almost become my primary workstation - I can get my exchange mail, I can get at (fortunately dont need to very often) Visual Source Safe via wine but most of what I do these days is all J2EE via eclipse. Whilst its at home my wife will probably use it for web browsing and mail and she already uses *nix based os's at work and really likes gnome.

My real passion is motorsport and one of the other uses for this laptop will be for doing live engine mapping on my car. The ECU is made by an american company called AEM and the software is windows-based. I'll try wine for running that is is only really serial IO and regular windows GDI graphics.

Wish me luck !!!
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Regards

Ian.