Sun May 16 21:26:35 CEST 2010

SONY VAIO VPCW21M1E white

I've got a new toy - small SONY VAIO netbook. Intel Atom N450, 10 inch LED 1366x768, RAM 1GB, 250GB. Interesting machine.

I've spent a week with it. Few moments with Windoze to realize I'm now able to use it (OK, not a surprise, I knew it before) ;-)

Here are some notes about the machine and about my tries with openSUSE 11.2 on it.

BIOS - insyde. No documentation, no user guide, nothing about the computer. Ten minutes trying to get there. Eventually found it (F1 or F2, don't know which one). PXE works. It also boots from USB! I was not able to test booting from SD - would be very killer app for me!

Trying openSUSE 11.2. When the download finished, I remember I have a boxed version on my desk 8)

Too many typos in the Czech version. (E.g. famous "dispaly" which I IMO already reported few years ago...). The combination of English and Czech is strange.

NetworkManager - still issues, unusable (listing hidden networks as Insecure even where it has WPA2 password stored etc...), slow compared to the ifup approach. I'm back with ifup, because I just want to use the system, not hack around all bugs in it.

Reboot doesn't reboot. The system halts, doesn't power off, and drains the battery/Temelin. Ups.

KDE in Czech is half Czech, too many English strings there, sometimes intermixed which is funny (Add vs. Upravit)...

I wanted to save some disk space (USB mass storage now because I want to test both environments there), thus I want to delete OOo. It is almost impossible. YaST interface for handling RPM packages is almost unusable, dependency hell also doesn't help.

What works and is a surprise to me? Close the lid, it suspends. Correctly. At least suspend to RAM. Suspend to disk doesn't work. You can't save more than 1 GB of RAM into 512 MB even when compressing... OK, someone has to warn the user somewhere in the process. Not that easy, I think. And I have to buy more memory and reshuffle the swap/partitioning anyway.

Volume keys work too (+, -, Mute)! Brightness keys don't work (already reported bug in Qt/KDE). I can fix the brightness using the Power manager GUI (ie. to Xtreme Powersave) though.

Firefox in full screen rocks on the display. Very sharp and clear display!

Camera and microphone works perfectly in Skype.

SD cards work perfectly (after inserting the card, KDE wants me to decide if I want to open digikam or file manager to the volume).

I'll add more notes later.

Posted by Pavel | Permanent link | File under: Mobile technologies