Linux users of Sony Z1 series

[Brouard Nicolas <>]

Kernel : After using the new kernel 2.6.11.3 patched with latest Alps
patches http://web.telia.com/~u89404340/patches/touchpad/2.6.11/  for a
week I can confirm that STD and STR (suspend to disk and to ram) are
working very very well. 
Instead of only using STR, I more often use STD (which is very quick on
suspending) in order to save the battery.

I got an answer from Peter Osterlund detailing me that his Alps patches
(above) are obviously not filed into 2.6.11.3 but into 2.6.12-rc1 . This
is a very good news that the Official kernel has the same consideration
now for the Alps touchpad as for the Synaptics touchpad.

Thus, any Linux distribution with a 2.6.12 kernel (distributed next
year?) will incorporate the Alps patches. I have asked Mandrake for an
inclusion in next release 10.2 but I don't know if I will be successful.
"My" 2.6.11.3 kernel rpm on sauvy.ined.fr/~brouard/sony/rpm is also on
Mandrake Club for testing. 

Latest synaptics-0.14.1-1mdk.i586.rpm  of Peter will be uploaded on
cooker tomorrow (also on my server).
Latest  qsynaptics-0.22.0-1mdk.i586.rpm will be uploaded on contribs
tomorrow.

My single remark concerning Alps or Kernel (I don't know) is that the
vertical scrolling bar is sometimes interrupted. But I haven't done
enough tests.

I don't know about Alps and GPM.

Many thanks to Peter from all members of this list.

P1/P2 buttons: Stuart's sonyxosd puts "Bluetooth off" on P1, and it is a
nice idea. So we could have other ideas for P2 is it was available on
Linux as it is on Windows (see reverse engineering discussed in a
previous mail).

If the Wifi button was on and Bluetooth off before suspending to disk,
Wifi but also Bluetooth are on after resuming. I mean that the blue led
of Bluetooth is on again (so push on P1 again) after resuming.
Bluetooth is power consuming and this is the reason for it has to be
off.

Ipw2100 driver incorporated recently a "power on" directive for power
management, use it. Don't know about ipw2200.

Sonyxosd: There is a sonyxosd.spec on the same server in the Mandrake
rpm for testing. But I am waiting for Stuart's next version with the
inclusion of the ~/.sonyxosdrc for customization of function keys and
functions themselves (if Stuart has time to do it...).
Also many perl modules are not distributed by Mandrake and you have to
use CPAN and build some libraries manually (I haven't checked this
recently and I am still using this old version, without the XOSD). Also,
I needed to add a delay of 1 second after resuming sonypi and I don't
know why.


hibernate-scripts - Still no time to check newer version of Bernard
Blackham. But the current rpm on my server works perfectly for me. I
can't upload it "as it is" on Mandrake contribs because parameterization
is too specific to Sony Z1 and includes videopost which obviously should
be packaged elsewhere.

Non Mandrake distribution users can just do "rpmbuild -ba
foo.src.rpm" (as standard user, not as root) in order to expand the
foo.spec and foo.tar.bz2 foo-pathes.bz2 (if any) on their ~/rpm/SPECS
and ~/rpm/SOURCES and directories in order to get the sources and
understand the patches and build process from the .spec .

When I will have time, I will propose something on the wiki, but I will
be highly inspired by what I wrote on
http://sauvy.ined.fr/~brouard/sony/#h-4.7 ("4.7  hibernate-scripts rpm
for Mandrake, video_post, susptoram and susptodisk" section and PAM
section to avoid sudo).

Linuxant modem driver: I haven't check recently with a recent kernel.
Greg, you might be right that it doesn't work anymore.

Our listserver, sympa, has been upgraded to version 5, and uses https
now instead of http. https://listes.ined.fr/wws/arc/linux-sony-z1 to
access archives.

Cheers,

Nicolas

 


-- 
Brouard Nicolas 
<>