My Dell Inspiron 5000 finally died so I decided to go small and light. So far I really like my Vaio; most things work really well but there are a few quirks (and things that just don't work right now).
The best page regarding Linux on the V505BX I've found so far is http://www.littleredbat.net/~mk/vaio.html. I don't really know if I have much to add. :-)
Note: None of these config files is perfect - let me know if there is anything that is incorrect.
Poor ACPI support is really the only annoying thing in this laptop. Actually, most things in ACPI work except for suspend to RAM (S3). I've filed a kernel bug report and am really trying to get this to work. I'll update this site if I figure it out.
It seems to work great with my external hard drive; in fact, USB tends to cause my machine to hang but with firewire things work like a charm. I have the following kernel modules loaded:
I had problems with the mouse jumping all over the place until I compiled Synaptics Touchpad support into the kernel.
You'll need to patch your kernel to get this to work. It's a one line fix that should be updated soon (I've contacted the kernel developers and they've updated it).
--- linux-2.4.20/drivers/net/wireless/orinoco_pci.c.orig 2003-05-21 11:40:59.000000000 -0400
+++ linux-2.4.20/drivers/net/wireless/orinoco_pci.c 2003-05-21 11:41:52.000000000 -0400
@@ -359,6 +359,7 @@
}
static struct pci_device_id orinoco_pci_pci_id_table[] __devinitdata = {
+ {0x1260, 0x3872, PCI_ANY_ID, PCI_ANY_ID,},
{0x1260, 0x3873, PCI_ANY_ID, PCI_ANY_ID,},
{0,},
};