The Vaio 707c is a P166 laptop with 32M of memory and an XGA TFT screen. It is very lightweight (~5 lbs without floppy or cdrom installed). Floppy & cdrom are interchangeable. This is a nuisance (I would rather have them both installed simultaneously) but this is the price you pay for light weight.

The 707c comes with the usual I/O ports on a laptop including one USB port and a built-in 33k modem. Pointing device is a touch pad.

External mouse plugs right in and works; no configuration needs to be done. Mouse and touchpad work simultaneously. External keyboard is probably the same, but I haven't tried it.

The laptop is good-looking, lightweight and quite powerful, even though not state-of-the art. I purchased it for ~$1100 refurbished.

Battery life is good enough that I leave the power brick home most times I take the machine out of the house. This saves even more weight.

My only complaints:

• cd & floppy interchangeable instead of both installed together
• touchpad requires a heavy hand to detect a click. Other laptops have facilities to tune touchpads, but if Sony has one, I haven't found it.
• PCMCIA slots do not have a cover; instead, there are dummy cards which are placed inside to keep the dust out. These are sure to become lost over time.
• page up, page down, home, end keys do not exist as separate keys, but accessible via the laptop "Fn" key. I would rather sacrifice the stupid win95 keys.

My first attempt to install Linux was with Redhat 4.2. Unfortunately, this version of linux does not understand the new Windows 95 (type 0B) partitions. I could probably have down-loaded new sources from kernel.org, but I elected to move up to Redhat 5.2 instead.

The first thing I did was to boot from the Linux install disk and examine the existing disk layout:

	type	id	start			size (512-byte blocks)
	fat32	0b	63 (0,1,1)		3,951,359
	save	a0	3,951,359 (490,0,1)	  274,176
	free		4,225,536		    8,064

NOTE: Whenever you play with a suspend partition, it's a good idea to copy at least the first few sectors of it to a backup location. On at least one other laptop (Sharp 9030), I have seen that the suspend-to-disk functionality does not work unless the system finds some sort of standard header in the suspend partition.

You can copy the suspend partition header with a command such as

dd if=/dev/hda4 of=/dev/fd

Hold down F2 while booting to get to the BIOS setup screen. Examine settings, learn what they mean. Turn off power management. Note the sound chip I/O address, DMA and interrupt.

Boot Windows and disable power management there for good measure.

Boot Win95, insert Redhat CD into drive, create boot and supplemental floppy disks. Utilities for doing this are in the \DosUtils directory of the Redhat CD

At the LILO boot prompt, just hit return. This takes you to the standard installation.

At the beginning of the process, you will be asked if you need pcmcia or scsi drivers. The answers to both questions are no. (You may want to add them later, but you don't need them to install.)

Next, choose "Local CDROM".

Fdisk shows this table:

	dev	begin	start	end	blocks		id
	hda1 *	  1	  1	255	1028128+	b
	hda4	491	491	524	 137088		a0

Linux needs (at the very least) a swap partition and a file system partition. If you elect to go with a single file system partition, this is very straightforward. If you want to have multiple filesystem partitions, you will have to create an "extended" partition which may then be further subdivided. I prefer to give the swap partition a main partition rather than one from the extended partition. I don't know if linux requires this or not.

In my own case, I create separate root and /usr partitions.

I like to have more than one root partition so that I can use one for emergency backup and another for experimenting. This isn't for most people, so your own partition table is likely to be much simpler.

Here's what I used:

	dev	begin	start	end	blocks		id
	hda1 *	  1	  1	255	1028128+	b (win95)
	hda2	256	256	268	  52416		82 (swap)
	hda3	269	269	490	 895104		5 (extended)
	hda4	491	491	524	 137088		a0 (suspend)
	hda5	269	269	294	 104800+	83 (linux) /
	hda6	295	295	307	  52384+	83 (linux) /linux2
	hda7	308	308	314	  28192+	83 (linux) /linux3
	hda8	315	315	490	 709600+	83 (linux) /usr

Continue with setup; everything works beautifully.

Log in; run startx. Works perfectly

Note: the things discussed here are common to all Linux installs, but I thought the information would be helpful.

This information is specific to Redhat 5.2, but should be pretty close to correct for other variants.

Edit /etc/sysconfig/network and set:

	HOSTNAME=myhostname

Redhat's netcfg has an interface for setting the hostname, but I just edit the file.

/dev/cdrom -> /dev/hdc

/dev/modem -> /dev/cua1

I have windows installed on the first partition of my drive (/dev/hda1). I mount it as "/dos"; it's a vfat file system; any user may mount it; it's not mounted automatically at boot time; it doesn't get dumped automatically and it doesn't get processed by fsck. I don't know what "unhide" means.

Hopefully the cdrom, floppy and dosfloppy entries are self-obvious.

The last entries are for my external scsi disks (/dev/sda1, /dev/sdb1). These are connected via a pcmcia scsi card. Plug the card in, wait while the system probes the drives (takes a while) and then go ahead and mount them.

Note that I do not have fsck run automatically on the scsi drives (that final '0' on the line.) This is because fsck will fail if the drives are not connected, and boot-up will fail. This means that it's a good idea to run fsck manually on the drives after mounting them.

Finally, don't forget to mkdir the /dos, /mnt/cdrom, /mnt/floppy, /mnt/dosfloppy directories and so on.

    4.2:
	Edit /etc/sysconfig/keyboard and change
		KEYTABLE="/usr/lib/kbd/keytables/us.map"
	to
		KEYTABLE="/usr/lib/kbd/keytables/falk.map"

	Copy defkeymap.map to falk.map and make these changes:

    5.2:
	Edit /etc/sysconfig/keyboard and change
		KEYTABLE=us.map
	to
		KEYTABLE=falk.map

Copy /usr/lib/kbd/keymaps/i386/qwerty/defkeymap.map.gz to falk.map.gz

Uncompress (gunzip) falk.map.gz; edit it.

My changes:

	  44,45c48,49
	  < keycode  14 = Delete	Delete          
	  < 	control	keycode  14 = BackSpace       
	  ---
	  > keycode  14 = BackSpace	Delete
	  > 	control	keycode  14 = Delete
	  69c73
	  < keycode  29 = Control         
	  ---
	  > keycode  29 = Caps_Lock       
	  116c120
	  < keycode  58 = Caps_Lock       
	  ---
	  > keycode  58 = Control         
	  238c242
	  < keycode 111 = Remove          
	  ---
	  > keycode 111 = Delete

Create .Xmodmap file in your home directory or in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit/.Xmodmap and add these lines:

	/usr/sbin/makewhatis /usr/man:/usr/X11R6/man

Edit /etc/sysconfig/pcmcia

	PCMCIA=yes
	PCIC=i82365
	PCIC_OPTS=
	CORE_OPTS=
	CARDMGR_OPTS=

host name

If you don't have any networking on your laptop, just put this one line in /etc/hosts:

If you want to set your machine's domain name, enter this:

PPP

Edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ppp0

Edit /etc/hosts and add an entry for your ppp interface.

You should also add a line to your /etc/hosts file for the interface.

If you use the DHCP protocol, it is not necessary to specify an IP address, network address or broadcast address. It is not necessary to add an entry to /etc/hosts. This is all handled by DHCP.

The ethernet cards I have used are

Domain Name

You should have a line somewhere in /etc/hosts that has the fully qualified domain name as the first name on the line, followed by the short hostname. Something like this:

You can manually add gateways to your configuration with netcfg, but this is not really the way to do it. The right way to do this is the routed routing daemon.

If the ethernet card is plugged in when you boot your system, routed starts automatically. Otherwise, it needs to be started manually after the ethernet card is inserted. There's probably a way to automate this, but I haven't figured it out yet. I'll update this webpage if I find out.

To use NIS, your system needs to have an NIS domain name. (Some systems, e.g. Solaris, use the same domain name for DNS or NIS, but Redhat Linux has seperate domains. I don't know why.)

1) Install ypbind package. It's also a good idea to have yp-tools.

2) Set the NIS domain name of your system. Edit /etc/sysconfig/network and add a line like this:

3) Edit /etc/yp.conf, and add a line like this:

If you don't have DNS or NIS, then this file can get pretty large, as it must contain the name of every computer you communicate with. Otherwise, it usually just holds the names of your own computer, and the few systems it needs to communicate with before DNS or NIS starts up.

Here's an example, assuming a ppp connection from home and an ethernet connection at work. My machine is named foo, and has two distinct domains. If I were to connect to my ISP and my ethernet at work simultaneously, chaos would probably result -- or at least a pretty serious firewall breach.

NFS

If you've configured your kernel for NFS client support and enabled networking, then nothing more needs to be done to be an NFS client. You simply add entries to /etc/fstab as needed. However, you may want to enable the automounter to make life easier.

To export NFS file systems for other hosts to mount, edit /etc/exports and add a line like this:

The automounter is a very convenient feature to have. You can refer to any system on your network simply as /net/remotehost/...

To enable NFS automounter: Install the am-utils RPM if it's not already installed. Automounter works automatically.

There were two problems with the sound chip. First, the chip would sometimes wake up screaming after a suspend-to-disk/resume cycle. Rebuilding the kernel seems to have fixed the problem. I also used xmixer to set the microphone volume to zero to eliminate feedback.

Second, attempts to record from /dev/dsp failed. There was a console error message to the effect that there was an I/O error, possibly related to a misconfigured interrupt. Playback worked just fine.

I executed these commands (as root):

It's important to reconfigure the kernel because the default kernel does not support Advanced Power Management (APM) or sound. Without APM enabled, the system is prone to an ugly divide-by-zero in the kernel after a suspend-to-disk sequence.

I also needed to rebuild the kernel to get the sound chip to behave properly.

Reconfiguring the kernel is easiest with the X windows config program. To run this:

• run the window system
• become super-user
• cd to /usr/src/linux
• "make xconfig"

Items which I left in the default setting, which were not applicable, or which I didn't understand are not listed here.

Naturally, you may choose different settings, depending on the options you want, and the accessories you have.

	/usr/lib/gcc-lib/i386-Redhat-linux/2.7.2.3/cpp  =>  /lib/cpp

Create an account for yourself with adduser

Add yourself to the "floppy" group in /etc/group so you can write floppy disks.