Sony VAIO FXxxx Utilities

The Sony VAIO PCG-FX Series is (in my opinion) pretty good computers, except for the fact that they have extremely poor support under Linux. My goal here is to change that.
To that end, I will be building a collection to tools to allow an owner of a Sony VAIO PCG-FX Series laptop to use Linux with as little inconvenience as possible.

What I want to accomplish:
Before we get anywhere close to a version 1.0 release, here is what I want to have done:

• The ability to use all of the Fn Button combinations
• The ability to use the PPK buttons
• The ability to suspend to RAM
• The ability to suspend to disk
• The ability to manage power preferences
• The ability to switch SpeedStep states

What we have right now:
First, please visit my page describing what works/doesn't work on a FX220 laptop. Almost everthing there will apply to other FX2xx laptops, and may help other FXxxx laptop owners as well.

Secondly, I have released sonyfxd. This is a daemon that runs in the background and answers requests to the Fn and PPK keys. We already have support for any functions dealing with the Fn keys, and the ability to handle Mute, Volume, and Brightness internally.
For more information, please see the sonyfxd

To Do

Here are my current plans. Right now, sonyfxd seems to be stable and work relatively well. However, it is limited. My goal is to go over to a client server model. In the next major release (0.2), I will remove the X features from sonyfxd and add in ACPI support. It will talk directly to the ACPI system, as well as the sonypi system. Clients (such as an X program for controlling volume/brightness) will connect to it via a Unix domain socket.
What are the advantages? First, the daemon will start up as root and remain running until the system shuts down. With support for both ACPI and sonypi, I will be able to implement such programs as the powerpanel and other status displays. Plus it will be easier for other people to develop other applications that plug into the system.
I have no idea when this will happen, but it will eventually :) page.