SuSE Linux 10.1 Professional



On



A Sony Vaio VGN S4XP



A.P. Johnson



24/12/2006










Specifications



Model Name: Sony VGN S4XP (Released early 2005) Processor: 2GHz Intel Centrino (Cache Memory 2MB) 533 MHz Front Side Bus, RAM: 1GB DDR2-400, Hard Disc:100GB SATA, Optical drive: DVD-RW/DL, Display: 1280x800 X-Black13.3 Inches LCD WXGA,Graphics Card: NVIDIA Geforce Go 6200 with Turbocache supporting up to 128MB, Wireless capabilities: WLAN/Bluetooth, Interfaces: SVGA, x1 PCMCIA, x2 USB 2.0, x1 Firewire, Memory Stick slot, Ethernet, 56kpbs Modem.



Installation Summary





Installing SuSE 10.10 was extremely simple with the above model. The first Linux distro that successfully installed was Ubuntu 6.05 based on Kernel 2.6.15-24.



The installation took about just over an hour (with just about all packages excluding KDE desktop. I chose GNOME).

YaST (The Hardware Installer on the SuSE distro) virtually sensed and configured everything aside from:



· The 56k modem (soft or windmodem)

· The special one-touch buttons to control screen brightness, volume.

· SVGA output



Apart from the above all else works satisfactorily. The sound quality is much louder and better than it ever was under Windows XP Pro-, which sits on another partition. Grub grants the user a choice of boot options namely; Windows or SuSE Linux 10.1. Once in SuSE Linux, you can access the NTFS partition as root only. You must also manually mount it. It is seen by Linux as sda1. All you do is create a mount point in the /mnt folder (i.e /windows). You can do one of two things hereafter. In the /etc.fstab file you can enter:



/dev/sda1 /mnt/windows ntfs noauto,user 0 0



Or



Open a terminal and simply enter: mount /dev/sda1



All the contents of the Windows partition become available for read-only access.





The computer is pleasure to use in both OS environments especially Linux of course. There are some features I have not got round to using such as WLAN/Bluetooth. However, YaST lists these in the hardware inventory. ( In Ubuntu 6.05 ,which based almost on the same kernel, WLAN worked. There is no reason why it shouldn’t under SuSE Linux 10.1)





A.P. Johnson



Linux Newbie