Installation of Linux on the Sony VAIO 505G

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First of all, alot of thanks goes to Ryan Weddle of UNC for all of his
suggestions.


The Sony VAIO 505G as I received it, has a 2.1GB drive, 32 MB RAM, a
VERY nice active matrix 800x600 screen, an internal 33.6/K56Flex modem,
USB port, external floppy, ONE PCMCIA slot, and port expander that
gives you the normal complement of ports. I also purchased the 14x
external CD ROM which comes with a PCMCIA ATA card.


I first tried installing from the CD, since you can boot from it.
Unfortunately, the installer (kernel) can't see the CD drive.

I don't have ready access to a network, or Partition Magic, so I had to
do things the hard way :)


Make your boot disks for Linux, (Redhat requires the "Supplemental
Diskette" because it detects the PCMCIA during install.)


As it came out of the box, the drive had two partitions on it.
Partition 1 had Win 98 with lots of apps on it, and Partition 4 is the
Hibernation partition, where the machine puts RAM and video data when
you put the book to sleep.  Partition 4 was something like 130MB, which
seemed like overkill to me.  I did some research, and found that the
size of Partition 4 only needs to be the size of your RAM plus about 3
MB for Video memory.  Run phdisk.exe (it's in the SonySys directory) to
resize it.  I got the partition down to about 35 MB.  fdisk reports the
parition id type as 'a0'.


Make a Win98 boot floppy, and make sure to include the atacdrom.sys
driver (in the sonysys\realmode cdrom directory).  Also copy over
fdisk, format, and xcopy32.  I actually found the easiest thing to do
was from within Win 98 to put the Application Recovery CD in and from
the "System" folder inside the recovery program, choose the middle
option....er something like SRCD?  It makes a recovery floppy for you,
but doesn't copy the driver over...go figure.  Anyway, use the recovery
utility to make the floppy, then copy atacdrom.sys to the floppy along
with XCOPY and/or xcopy32.

  Add the line: device=atacdrom.sys /D:MSCD001

to the config.sys file


Now, you can boot from the floppy, press C to cancel, and get a minimal
system with access to the CD, which is on Z:


Use fdisk, select "Large disk support" to make a FAT32 partition of
about 900MB on partition 1.  Reboot with an old DOS boot floppy
(easiest to use a DOS 6 installation floppy), and use DOS fdisk.  It
won't recognize the FAT32 partition, so it will let you create a second
DOS partition with a "Primary Number".  Make this FAT16 partition on
Partition 2, and about 1000MB.  That leaves about 125MB of unused space
between Partition 2 and 4 for your swap.

Okay. Reboot with your Win98 boot disk. Your FAT32 partition will be
seen as C: and the FAT16 (partition 2) as D:.

Format Partition 2 D: (Since my linux installer wouldn't mount a FAT32
partition.)  In my case, with Redhat, use xcopy /s z:\redhat\ d:\redhat

(With Slackware, the directory on the CD is z:\slakware, etc.  You get
the idea...)


to copy the redhat distribution directory to the FAT16 partition.


At this point, I plugged in the Port Replicator, and connected my
parallel Zip drive.


I rebooted with the Redhat 5.0 CD in the drive and fed the notebook the
Supplemental Diskette when it asked. I gave it the info on my Zip, and
selected Hard Drive for installation method.  Use fdisk to change hda1
from FAT32 to Linux Native (type 83) and create a Linux swap partition
on hda3.


Point the installer to hda2/ for the installation files.

Cross your fingers and install!


I went ahead and answered questions about X with Generic VGA and
Generic Monitor settings, but this didn't work.  After installation,
the machine rebooted, and I was able to log in as root.

I installed pcmcia-cs-3.0.5

This is available at sunsite.unc.edu.

copy the tar.gz file into /usr/src, gunzip and untar it.

cd to the pcmcia-cs-3.0.5 directory

make config

make all

make install


Reboot, and you have access to your CD ROM on /dev/hdc

Redhat 5.0 came with XFree86 3.3.1, the XBF-Neomagic server available
at ftp.redhat.com requires XFree86 3.3.2 or higher.

So, I got the Xfree86 3.3.2 rpm, and had to force it to install.

rpm -U --force Xfree86....


Then I installed the XBF-neomagic-glibc-1.0.0-1.i386.rpm.

Change the symbolic link to "X" with:

ln -sf /usr/X11R6/bin/XBF_Neomagic /etc/X11/X


Copy your old /etc/X11/XF86Config, if you want to XF86Config.bak or
something similar.


Copy /etc/X11/XF86Config.neomagic to /etc/X11/XF86Config


startx for 8 bpp

or

startx -- -bpp 16 for 16 bit color


Voila!

I installed Applixware Office suite.

I installed Netscape,  but alas couldn't get the internal modem to
work...

Once again, thanks to Ryan Weddle, I learned that the PCMCIA card was
having an IRQ conflict with the internal modem.  So right now, I can
use the modem as long as the CD ROM isn't plugged in...


Please, bear in mind that I am a real newcomer to the Linux/UNIX world,
and realize that I know next to nothing.  It took me four or five days
to refine this process to where it takes me an hour or less to do.  If
any Linux gurus out there have suggestions or just flat out better
methods, please let me know!

GOOD LUCK!