Take for example, the current laptop I’m using. A Sony Vaio Z540. They don’t get much shinier. It’s incredibly light, and it looks stunning. A huge step up from my previous laptop I lugged around when travelling (A giant HP ‘desktop replacement’ monster with I kid you not.. two internal hard disks).

Unfortunately, whilst it’s shiny on the surface, it quickly became apparent after using it for a while, that Sony hates you.
(Well, me in this case, but you get the idea).

When I first got the thing, the number of things that didn’t work in Linux were numerous.

• It has one of those lovely switchable graphics switches to toggle between Intel graphics (Stamina) or Nvidia graphics (Speed). Whilst it’s nice to have a SUCCESS <--> FAIL switch on a laptop, it is utterly useless in Linux, because we don’t speak WMI or whatever magical incantations Sony have dreamed up to a) get notifications when the switch is toggled, and b) do something about it like switch chipsets. Oh, and X will probably shit its pants in such a scenario right now even if it did do something useful. Back to the story: When I first got this thing, X would freak out at startup. The paraphrased logs went something like

  • Oh, an Intel chipset. I know how to drive this.

  • oh wow, I found an nvidia chipset. I have no idea what to do with this.
  • Umm, what was that first chipset again? I forgot. Sorry. How about I just fail to start X ?

  This got fixed up pretty quickly thankfully. Because whilst I love me some tty action, it really was kind of miserable.

• Rebooting didn’t work. Linux supports about a half dozen or so methods of rebooting. From triple faulting the CPU, to calling ACPI methods, to other strange actions that have traditionally caused a computer to reboot. None of them worked on the Vaio. This magically started working recently, I’m still not entirely sure what fixed it.
• Fun with sound. You’d expect that when you plug in some headphones and start grooving to your tunes that you’d stop annoying everyone else in the room. But no! Sony decided to make disabling of the internal speakers a software driven thing, so now Alsa needs to poke magical bits somewhere when it detects you plugged in headphones. Except it doesn’t. So we still fail. I keep meaning to get around to poking at this. It’s probably something trivial like yet another quirk that needs adding to the hda-intel driver.
• Virtualisation.
  Remember how I said above that Sony hates you? You have a shiny Core 2 Duo P8600, which has VMX. Sony opt to disable it in the BIOS, and not even give you an option to turn it back on. There are some truly heroic efforts to reenable it on some other models of the Vaio, but they involve all kinds of madness that wouldn’t exist if Sony weren’t being complete dicks.

• Insyde BIOS.
  This deserves it’s own entry because it’s the most shockingly godawful BIOS known to man. I never thought I’d say I missed an Award BIOS.

• The keyboard.
  This is my number one reason right now for advising people not to buy one of these. All the previous problems are at least fixable (or work-around-able). When I first got it, it was actually remarkably nice to type on. In fact all the reviews you’ll find online talk up how nice it is to type on. Indeed it was, when it was brand new. Unfortunately after two months, it seems I got the James Bond self-destructing laptop. If you imagine looking at a key side-on, it’s supposed to be horizontal, and remain horizontal as you push it down. My ctrl and alt keys now look more like \ and they don’t seem to be easily fixable. Attempts at removing them have been aborted when they feel like they’re just going to snap off. I don’t have a particularly aggressive typing action. I actually prefer ‘softer’ keyboards to clunky horrors like the Model M (heresy I know, bite me). So I don’t think I’m a special case here. If I hammered on the keys I could perhaps forgive them for failing so soon. I’d love to know Sonys return rate for failed keyboards.

That’s just the more obvious pet peeves about this machine. Remarkably, the things that usually plague laptops (wireless, suspend/resume) actually ‘just worked’ in Fedora 10. I was actually really surprised by this.

Andrew Morton terrorised kernel developers for years with his vaio of doom. There’s just something about them that makes them a complete pain in the ass to deal with. At least one of the reasons is that Sony go out of their way to do things differently to everyone else, even when there’s no really good reason to.

So yeah, don’t buy a Vaio. You’ll be thankful.

Friends don’t let friends buy Vaio’s. is a post from: codemonkey.org.uk

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(II) RADEON(0): Port2:
Monitor — AUTO
Connector — SCART
DAC Type — Primary
TMDS Type — None
DDC Type — 0×0

Does a radeon with a SCART connector even exist? If so, WHY??

Bonghit BIOS failure of the day that makes my new LCD only come up in 1024×768 if I use the VGA in. Thankfully DVI works. Time to get a dual-DVI card hooked up I think.

Fail of the day – Radeon. is a post from: codemonkey.org.uk

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This thread is a summary of all manner of problems with it, but in short, it corrupts data past a certain block number. This took a lot of tracking down. (And badblocks takes forever to run when in destructive mode).

There is mention in that thread that a firmware update fixes the problem. Unfortunately, the DOS based flasher program seems completely unable to even write to my card.

I guess I’ll only use this controller for smaller disks, unless someone comes up with a workaround.

SATA disasters with the Silicon Image 3114 is a post from: codemonkey.org.uk

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So the first thing I need to do is reset it. Here’s the list of rules of acceptable password rules.

* The password must be at least eight characters long, and can contain letters, numbers, and punctuation.
* It must not exceed fourteen (14) characters.
* It must contain at least one alpha character [a-z; A-Z].
* It cannot contain spaces.
* The password cannot be the same as any of your previous eight (8) passwords.
* It cannot contain your login id.
* It may not contain any of the following special characters: Asterisk (*) Comma (,) Backslash ( /) Forward Slash (\).

Then, after a dozen attempts to pick something that it’ll like, I pass the hurdle to get to play the next game..

“You are attempting to access [REDACTED] Premier Support but you do not have a user account.

If you continue to have problems, please contact [REDACTED] Customer Support.”

Excuse me? Despite having just set a password, I don’t have a user account? So what did I set the password on?

This, is what fail looks like. And it fails harder every single time I have to use this ‘service’. Hate.

update:
It gets better. So I sent a nastygram to the support email address explaining just how utterly unusable their site was. They sent me back an email, containing a password for no obvious reason.

Thinking “perhaps they’ve reset the account or something”, I tried to log in with it.

Your session has timed out. For security reasons, if there has been no activity for an extended period of time, you will be required to login again. Thank you.

This is awesome, because I NEVER GOT TO LOG IN.

FFS. It’s like a success story from uncov.

Web unusability. is a post from: codemonkey.org.uk

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