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:
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.
David Levitan <david@dlevitan.com>
Last Modified: 04/18/2002