• Contact: Dave Crooke (dcrooke AT Google's hosted email service)
• Make: Sony
• Brand: Vaio
• Model: VGN-FW180E

• Website: http://b2b.sony.com/Solutions/product/VGN-FW180E/H

Current Issues

This is my work laptop, so I can't afford to dink with dev releases.

I'm using the Intrepid 8.10 amd64 Beta and installing updates pretty much daily. Some minor functionality goes in and out with every patch, and I've had to do a little manual intervention once with dpkg, but the general trend is one of rapid improvement - in general, I'm very impressed. Note: I went for the Intrepid beta rather than Hardy because Intrepid is the first Ubuntu release to support the wireless chipset in this laptop, which is the new Intel Link 5100 (with 802.11n support) ... the first release of the Linux kernel to support this chipset is 2.6.27

The biggest issues are with power management:

• Brightness control does not work - the backlight is at full power unless the screen is blanked
• The CPU runs pretty hot, over 50C according to the Gnome CPU temp applet when the system is more or less idle. This is despite the system asserting that it has both cores clocked down to 800MHz. I suspect (but have no hard data) that scaling may not be working right.
• The battery applet reports a predicted runtime of 75 mins while idling, which unfortunately appears correct. The standard battery is marketed as a 4 hour battery, which admittedly it probably isn't under Windows either, but I would expect to get 2 to 2.5 hours if power management was working

• If used on your lap, it's uncomfortably warm

There are a few other, minor gremlins and annoyances:

• Suspend/Hibernate tend to get broken by patches, though are working at time of writing (Oct 28)
• When headphones are plugged into the jack on the front of the laptop:
  • the speaker above the keyboard does not cut off as you'd expect. However, it can be turned off manually from the mixer software.
  • only the left audio works on the headphones
• The system locks up if an external monitor (HDMI or VGA) is connected while X is running
• The closed-source ATI fglrx driver is not yet available, but it works fine under Hardy 8.04 and a 2.6.25 kernel

Something I feel is worth noting is the converse - the surprising amount of stuff that DOES work, out of the box at that ... this is a new Sony model, and Sony is notorious (with me anyway) for using wierd and funky hardware that is not Linux friendly.

• Widescreen display, VGA, and HDMI all work with Xorg autodetected settings, and are sensibly named in xrandr
• Off-brand Gigabit Ethernet, brand new Intel wireless chipset, Bluetooth

• MotionEye camera

• Touchpad, with X / Linux rather than BIOS level control (tap to click always gets me)
• Volume keys
• Blu-Ray drive (though there is no BD-Video player software in Ubuntu)
• SD card reader

System Info

*Meta-Bug*: these commands do not exist in Intrepid

system-manufacturer: ACER

system-product-name: ASPIRE 7520

system-version: V1.10

Hardware details

Notes

CategoryLaptop