After I left my previous job I was in the market for a new laptop, so after a bit of searching I purchased a Sony VAIO SZ2XP. I’m very happy with it, although every now and then I get some doubts over whether I should have bought the TX model instead. Either way, it’s a beautiful machine, very lightweight (1.65kg) but it feels sturdier than most laptops I’m familiar with (not including those 17″, 4kg desktop replacement beasts). Very good specs, and it’s pretty much the only laptop I could find with both a PCMCIA and a PC-Express slot, which was an important criterion for me.
What’s particularly impressive about it is the beautiful high-contrast screen. It really is a pleasure to look at. I was initially not such a fan of ‘glossy’ laptop screens, because of fears of how it would hold up in bad light conditions, but I’m completely over that now. Glossy screens all the way! Sure, if you turn the brightness too low to conserve batteries you will see your reflection in it, but even then you can still work on it without any problems. Whereas with a classic ‘anti-glare’ screen, any ambient light will be spread out all over the screen and you can’t see a thing anymore, even if you turn the brightness all the way up.
Naturally, on the day I bought it, after briefly booting Windows to check that the hardware was working and the screen was undamaged, I installed Linux on it. First Ubuntu Edgy, and a few days ago I upgraded to RC4 of Feisty. The upgrade worked flawlessly and was just a matter of pointing Synaptic at the new repositories (sudo sed -i.bak -e ’s/edgy/feisty/’ /etc/apt/sources.list) and doing a refresh.
The VAIO is not known to be the easiest machine to get Linux running on, but in my research I had not found any showstoppers, so I decided to risk it. And I must say, I was pleasantly surprised by how smoothly everything went. All of the basics were recognized out of the box: video, sound, network, both processor cores, Intel Speedstep support, most of the power management stuff, etc.
The SZ series actually has two video cards: an NVidia for cool 3D stuff, and a less manly but also less power-hungry Intel card. Both are supported out of the box, but of course they need different drivers so you can’t just switch between them on the fly (same is true under Windows: the switch takes effect after you reboot). And of course, you need to install the proprietary binary drivers from NVidia to get the most out it 3D-wise. Beryl works great, after installing the latest NVidia drivers and doing some minor tweaking. I have to admit, I really get a kick out of showing off the eye candy to people who’ve just installed Vista. 
The wifi card is an Intel ipw3945, which is supported by an open-source driver although it’s relegated to Ubuntu’s “restricted” ghetto because it’s one of those binary blob drivers. It works, but wpa_supplicant complains about not being able to enable WPA on the driver. That’s supposedly an Ubuntu problem rather than something inherent in the device or the driver, but it’s still not solved in Feisty RC4. I haven’t yet gotten around to recompiling the driver.
The webcam is supported since about a week, thanks to Sam Revitch who reverse-engineered the Windows driver and succesfully wrote a video4linux driver. As with most of those built-in webcams, image quality is decent with good light, but in less perfect light conditions there’s a lot of noise in the picture, especially in high resolution (640×480).
Supposedly, there’s some work going on to support the fingerprint reader as well, although frankly the most useful thing I can think of doing with it is to use it as a third mouse button.
Unexpectedly, the biggest problem is the network card. As I said, it works out of the box, but it’s rather unreliable. The sky2 driver has a long history of problems: crashing under heavy load, hanging when coming out of hibernation, etc. It’s being worked on, but even with 2.6.20 it still hangs occasionally. Supposedly, a different driver from Sysconnect can be used as an alternative, but I haven’t tried that yet.
Lots more info here: http://avilella.googlepages.com/vaiosz
Hi.
I recently installed Ubuntu Feisty 7.04 on my SZ series Vaio too. I’ve been battling a little with the video drivers. I’d like to additionally have an external screen running and I have some problems with the Myth front-end that I suspect are related. When I install any of the nvidia-glx packages (nvidia-glx, nvidia-glx-new or nvidia-glx-legacy) and change my xorg.conf to use the “nvidia” driver I get a “no device available” message (or similar) from “X – probeonly”, before a “no screens available” message. I tried installing the binary packages from NVidia (the current Linux AMD64 bit version and the AMX64 bit beta version too), but they claimed that they were not applicable to my video hardware (which is odd, as the 7400 GO is listed in the release note compatibility list of both, I have an SZ3XWP/C).
From your blog it seems you cracked this somehow. Do you know what I need to do?
Thanks in advance!
Hi David,
I haven’t tried a multi-display setup yet. I used the NVidia binary package; it had no problem recognizing my card, however, after a reboot the new X drivers would complain about not matching the kernel drivers. It turned out that the initrd image being preloaded by the kernel, still contained the old drivers, even though the new ones had been otherwise properly installed. Cute problem to debug, that.
I upgraded Edgy to Feisty and had no specific issues with the video, but I haven’t used the laptop much recently.
Unfortunately, I’m dealing with a bug of my own right now, of the medical type. After that, I think I’m going to install Feisty from scratch and see what happens..
Hi Martin,
I found some remarks to the effect that the SZ series has two video chipsets (one Intel, one NVidia) which are selected between using the Stamina/Speed switch. I switched to Speed and it then all worked fine.
Thanks for the help!
I have a sony vaio SZ2XP that had both cores identified with dapper, but on upgrading to edgy I started hitting problems.
It boots fine with the 386 kernel, but that only uses one core. If I select the generic kernel from the grub menu it just hangs before even getting to the splash screen.
Ideas?
[...] With a 4.1″ screen, the N810 is a little bigger than your average PDA or smartphone. From the negative side, that means it’s just too large to comfortably fit in my pants pockets (especially since it still requires a separate phone to make UMTS calls — the device does not have built-in UMTS capability) while not being large or powerful enough to be a laptop replacement. From the positive side, it’s a lot more pleasant to do webbrowsing or e-mail on than a regular PDA (after all, not so long ago many people would have considered an 800-pixels-wide screen perfectly adequate for a laptop or even a desktop) while still fitting easily in a pocket of my jacket. My Sony Vaio SZ is pretty lightweight for a laptop with a full-sized keyboard, but I expect to leave it home more and more often now that I have the N810. [...]
i buyed the one Sony vaio last week. Model no:VGN-FZ31M from Turkey. Here the price About 1900 USD. i don’t know how much is it on the another countriest? who know more cheap price for the model? Anyway i am glad the than PC. it is very fast and very bright screen.
Hi thanks for the info. just want to ask if what is better when it comes to games, is it Sony Vaio P or the Sony SZ2XP ?
Thanks for your info. I will soon install ubuntu on my vaio.
WHats the diiference with the TX? those beasts you mention are they those dell ones that are like the size of a briefcase and have like 5.1 built in? Have you seen that bravia tv mobile from ericsson now that will make you think twice lol. nah sonys cool ive got my dj headphones on from sony god i love them ad not bad for 40 bucks. that bravia phone pic is here btw http://mobilephoneblogaroo.wordpress.com/sony-ericsson-bravia-tv-mobile-phone
I used the NVidia binary package; it had no problem recognizing my card, however, after a reboot the new X drivers would complain about not matching the kernel drivers.
The Sony Vaio VGN SZ61 MN/B is something I can live with. Though the always running fan makes it less than ideal for power saving purposes, most important devices work out of the box. Integrated web cam drivers and suspend with Nvidia would be nice touches if possible in further Ubuntu versions.
The Sony Vaio VGN SZ61 is very useful for the power saving purposes and for its intense light quality.Running Ubuntu on Sony VAIO SZ2XP provides all the good features to use it at world wide level.
Do not buy Sony Laptop or notebook warranty.If you buy it,let’s say 4 year plan,and you have have few problems,they will tell you that they won’t service it.Even htough you still have two years left on your warranty.They will give you a lot of run around.I am dealing with it right now.I bought VGN-SZ430N for almost $2000 plus $400 for premium extended onsite service.It does not mean anything.They do not abide by the term of the contract.I would highly recommend,as a victim of this ,do not buy Vaio or atleast don’t waste your money on the extended warranty.You would be sorry>
Extended warranties are usually a bad deal for the customer (and a good deal for the vendor, which is why they tend to hard-sell them). Especially for laptops, since a) most of the kinds of damage which you can expect to get after the default warranty period, are very easy for the manufacturer to blame on “normal wear and tear”, and b) by the time the extended warranty period kicks in, you may be tempted to simply get a new laptop anyway.
IANAL, but my understanding is that by European law, consumers are entitled to products which fulfil the “reasonable expectations” which a normal person would have of them, even in the absence of a warranty. Since most people would expect a $2000 laptop to last for more than a year, this means that Sony should fix it even without the extended warranty. Good luck getting any them to honor that law, of course..