Laptop Linux: Red Hat 9.0 and SUSE 10.0 to 11.4 on Sony Vaio SRX-51P/A, N505X, Asus eee PC701 and HP Mini-Note 2133

First off, here's a summary table of all the Laptop and Linux combinations I have successfully installed:

Sony	Vaio PCG-N505X	Red Hat 6.2
Sony	Vaio PCG-N505X	Red Hat 9.0
Sony	Vaio SRX-51P/A	Red Hat 9.0
Sony	Vaio SRX-51P/A	openSUSE 10.0
HP	Omnibook 500	openSUSE 10.2
Asus	eee PC701	openSUSE 10.3
HP	Mini-Note 2133	openSUSE 11.0
HP	Omnibook 500	openSUSE 11.1
HP	Mini-Note 2133	openSUSE 11.4
Asus	eee PC701	Android-x86 2.2.2

In early 2000 I acquired a Sony Vaio PCG-N505X, and ran Red Hat Linux 6.2 on it for nearly 4 years. In mid-2003, it became time for some new hardware and software, so I went for its descendant, the Vaio SRX-51P/A and installed Red Hat 9.0 on that.

Having successfully got RH9.0 up and running on the SRX-51, I then cloned the config from its hard disk onto a new hard disk which I brain-transplanted into the N505X.

Jun 2006

Although both my (non-edible :-) laptops were still going hardware-wise, Linux had come a long way since Red Hat 9.0, and I successfully installed SUSE 10.0 on my SRX-51 and upgraded its internal WiFi card to 802.11a/b/g.

SUSE 10.0 worked very nicely on this laptop, mostly out the box without any of the kernel-tweaking needed for Red Hat. Upgrading the internal miniPCI network card to a 802.11a/b/g Netegriti WiFi card was also fairly straightforward, and it worked well. I was even able to get suspend-to-disk and a bluetooth mouse working at long last :-)

I also tried SUSE 10.1 on this laptop, I'd strongly recommend against this for the following reasons:

The package management on most versions of SUSE 10.1 was hopelessly broken.

Working drivers for the Intel i810 video chipset on this laptop are not present in SUSE 10.1.
This appears to be fixed in openSUSE 10.3 onwards.

The madwifi drivers for the Atheros chipset of my internal upgraded wireless card need to be
downloaded seperately from here.
The drivers for the original Orinoco 802.11b wireless card supplied in this laptop seem okay.

Shortly afterwards I installed openSUSE 10.2 on my HP desktop, and had a rather better experience with that.

Dec 2007

Unfortunately time and travel took their toll on my trusty SRX-51, and it eventually started to show its mileage, so I bought a tiny new Asus eee laptop :-) It is great this comes with Linux pre-installed, though I was not massively impressed with the Xandros distribution it came with.

As a consequence I have got openSUSE 10.3 working on it, a tight fit into the 4Gb internal flash, but doable. A summary of how to do this with grateful thanks to all the folks at the EEE User is available here.

Dec 2008

The eee was a great stop-gap, and remains very much to hand for short and non-work trips. But I needed something more serious, so got a custom-built max-spec version of the HP 2133 Mini-Note, which came pre-installed and certified for Novell's SLED10SP2 version of SuSE Linux :-) I however scrubbed this in favour of openSUSE 11.0 after good experiences with the latter on a new server, and it installed on the HP2133 more or less out the box.

There are however some points worth commenting on:

I eventually got the openchrome VIA video drivers working, but only after much confusion, also accelerated support remains partial and it will not drive the external video port. Would be nice if VIA could get their act up to what Nvidia and ATI have done with openSUSE over the past couple of years. But SuSE also need to improve their video driver installation support (see above re legacy Intel support), it remains the single biggest pain point for me.

Even with a 1.6GHz CPU and 2GB RAM, performance could be better - if I ever get the video working properly I'll be surprised if it can play back 720p content. Don't even think about runing Vista on this machine..

In order to get 802.11a wireless support for the BCM4312 internal WiFi card, you need to run the Broadcom-shipped binary driver, not the open-source b43 driver.

Everything else, including suspend and bluetooth, works nicely :-)

Jul 2009

I'd really like to be an advocate for openSUSE, it mostly works very well. Just upgraded two openSUSE 10.2 systems (my main desktop, and an HP Omnibook 500 aging laptop) to openSUSE 11.1. Overall, the package management is much smoother, and lots of things work well, including a D-Link DWA-642 PCMCIA wireless card using the ath9k driver. BUT:

I can't believe they shipped openSUSE 11.1 with broken bluetooth and half the bluetooth utilities missing. Modern laptop show-stopper for me :-(

Video driver installation remains a nightmare. Eventually got Nvidia re-working on the desktop after several install/re-install attempts, but the ATI mach64 driver does nothing but paint the wierdest pattern on the laptop screen after startup. The plain VESA driver seems to be the only thing that will work on the Omnibook. It would help a lot if there were better lists of which driver works with which exact card models. But really the SaX2 video installer needs a major overhaul to actually get it right more than 10% of the time.

What is this pulseaudio crap ? It seems to break things without adding any useful functionality.

KDE4 breaks many things that worked in KDE3, in particular no means to import KDE3 configs, and no IRC or webcam support in kopete :-( Meantime support for KDE3 seems to have dried up, that kopete no longer interoperates with Yahoo. Sigh.

Any reports that knetworkmanager supports 3G sticks or openVPN appear to be imaginary.

Aug 2011

I have now upgraded my HP 2133 to Open SUSE 11.4, including swapping an Intel 80Gb SSD in for the hard disk, and finally migrating to a KDE desktop. On the whole, it works great, though the VIA chipset in this machine is a little underpowered for KDE4. Finally got an openchrome video driver (some custom config was needed - see here) that actually supports video playback, though again there's not quite enough juice in there to play MPEG2 back at 720p resolution. The external video port can just about be coaxed into working, though only if you re-start X with the external VGA port both configured and connected, and the screen and resolution has to mirror the panel display. And configuring "disable desktop effects" in kpowersave causes random "black screens of death" which can only be recivered from by killing and restarting X. I am never going to buy another PC with a VIA chipset in it, their open source graphics support is just a mess.

There's also a known issue with knetworkmanager where it is possible (e.g. after USB tethering to an Android device, or using the wireless switch to disable WiFi) to lock the network off and not be able to re-enable it without re-starting the entire network stack (including removing and re-inserting the various ndis kernel modules) or a hard reboot. Looks like knetworkmanager should now support 3G sticks and OpenVPN out the box okay though, have not tried this.

Suspend is a bit visually messy but works okay, though requires a swap paritition to be configured, which in turn even with 2Gb RAM gets used for swapping during regular operation of the machine - this use of the SSD makes me nervous but I think the netbook will reach the end of its life before the SSD wears out.

Nov 2011

I tried Thunderbird v6.0 when I first installed 11.4, and the performance has been awful, sometimes it just seems to get stuck forever when doing an off-line sync, and even worse when typing text into an edit window on an otherwise idle machine the display echo can lag by 5-10 characters ! Have now upgraded to Thunderbird v8.0 to see if this helps things, if it does not then I cannot recommend this laptop as being usable for current Thunderbird as its mail app :-( Firefox meantime seems to guzzle 10-20% of CPU continuously even when idle and minimized.

Finally, thanks to all the people who have contributed entries to Linux Laptop pages, and in particular those whose links I have listed for convincing me that it was even worth trying to get Linux up on these nice pieces of hardware.