Hi, I owned a z133gx. I delete the raid use 2 64G disk seperately and take out the optical drive put a hard disk bay with 256G Samsung Pro SSD into it. (I also ordered some transparent skin on ebay, works great. If you are interested in exchanging some ideas about accessories let me know.) Recently I decided to put a Linux on it. I have to say it's really a pain comparing to thinkpad:
1. Os selection from most stable to less stable on my list are: CentOs 7, Ubuntu LTS/Mint, Arch or Gentoo. 1.1 CentOs 7: Gnome is ugly(if I don't care the style I won't buy a Z), KDE is nice. However I'm keeping getting a msg like intel_wait_for_pipe_off from kernel and find software on centos is not easy. I cannot even install conky from yum. I prefer to keep an eye on the status of the machine. Conky is a must for me. For that reason I use rain meter under windows. However it's another story... As a result I gave up on centos. 1.2 Arch I don't use it for a long time. A quick way to install it uses a derivative distro like ArchBang. My experiences with software update is each time I update, something will be broken. As Vaio Z is a tricky machine, I perhaps don't want that unstability (Please correct me if I'm wrong). 1.3 Only Ubuntu Family left. I can't install the 14.04 LTS, because the machine freezes after getting into gnome. And Mint 13 cannot install the bootloader(errrr...). So I end up with Ubuntu 12.04. As you all know there's lots of post installation work: 2. SSD optimization I put things like noatime,nodiratime,discard,commit=xxx for ssd and create more tmpfs partitions. Other things like swappiness and elevator you could easily find by googling. Another strange thing I rarely see anybody mentioned on vaio z wiki or anywhere online is the reboot problem. I'm using kernel 3.11. I could shutdown, but not reboot. Each time I reboot, my z hangs. (Do you guys have the similar issue?) I'm solving it by adding kernel parameter reboot=triple. 3. Video Cards It's quite straight forward with bumblebee. The only thing I think is to install the intel driver first. It's wired it's not installed by default. I just add the glensan repo and do a apt-get. After reboot, you will find the touchpad stop working. There's an article on wiki telling you how to solve it(Thanks again) 4. I installed tlp did some tweak. It works fine. My power consumption is around 11Watt. I assume it's per hour. I saw some article saying it's per second(???) it doesn't make sense at all. Let's assume it's per hour for now. It means my standard 4400mah battery will give me around 4 hours.(Now you see if it's per second. It means the battery will only give me 4 seconds!). Not bad but not ideal I'm considering buying an extended battery like 7200mah. 5. Fingerprints work with fingerprint gui not fprint. fingerprint gui is very nice software. But the gui needs some improvements. I'm considering hiding the gui for now. The last thing on my todo list is the sony z dkms. I'm wondering what's the difference between sony laptop module and sony laptop z module? Is it suitable for the current kernel 3.11 and 3.13? Another thing I noticed is that after using 3.13, my shutdown and reboot become slower. Thanks for reading, all comments and ideas are welcome. Too bad there's no sony vaio any more, let's keep Z alive!
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