Re: Opinions of Sony Vaio VGN-A417S for Debian
"James Brown" <jbrown@orange.net> writes:
> Iain Georgeson wrote:
>> It's not. I've got Debian on my A417M, but it took a considerable
>> amount of surgery, and I'm still missing support for some fairly handy
>> bits like suspend and soft keys.
>
> Could you shed some light on what was difficult please? Which version of
> Debian did you use?
I installed from an etch daily (2005-07-13).
There's some summary on the bug (http://bugs.debian.org/319486).
The key issue was that the A417M has SATA drives. d-i only had fairly
preliminary support for that at the time, and I had to make a bug fix
to the daily and build a new install kernel to get it to boot.
> Do you think Debian support for the VGN A series will improve over time
> and maybe a future release will be much easier to install?
I've no doubt that the installer copes much better with SATA now. You
may want to head over to debian-boot, give them an overview of the
hardware on the box, and ask if any of it is likely to be a
showstopper.
And as I mentioned, there are a few holes in the hardware support.
suspend isn't happening, and I'm not very sure why. The softkey driver
seems to have succumbed to bit rot, as has the ATI driver, and the Alps
Glidepad just isn't quite behaving as it should. And I can't find any
temperature sensors.
Iain.
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