Xubuntu 12.04 on my Sony Vaio VPCS13V9E

This is my installation report about installing the new Xubuntu 12.04 beta 2 on my Sony Vaio VPCS13V9E/B. This is the fourth attempt to install a different linux distribution on my Vaio. Before Xubuntu 12.04 came Linux Mint 12, which was a total failure, and Fedora Core 16. The SELinux seemed contra-productive for a developer notebook to me. Ubuntu 10.10 and 11.04 were total failures, too. The EDID, needed for the graphics, were not present and had to be extracted on a windows machine. The text-based installation was the only way to cope with the problem.

Now comes (X)ubuntu 12.04, my personal highlight so far. I've used the default installation image, downloaded from the official website. I decided to use a classic CD, the attempt to use an usb key instead failed because it just did not boot from it.

The installation went fine and without problems, even the graphics were good to go. After the reboot I found a system with well recognized hardware. WLAN, Bluetooth, network, sound, touchpad with multitouch (two-finger-scroll) and nvidia graphics were all good. Even the HDMI port and the sound over HDMI worked properly from the start.

The problems left:

• UMTS - The Qualcom Gobi 2000 is always a problem
• Keyboard backlight
• Adaptive screen brightness
• Screen brightness controls

The Gobi 2000 problem is easy to solve, as long as you have the windows drivers at hand. The gobi card has to be initialized with the proper firmware for your carrier (mine is O2 germany, which I will use as example). If you have a windows dual boot, just copy the folder C:\Program Files (x86)\QUALCOMM to an usb key. Otherwise download the firmware from the Sony support website and install it via wine. In the QUALCOMM folder you'll find a folder named "Images", which contains  numbered subfolders (0-12) and a folder named UMTS. Now you have to find out which number is correct for your service provider (Mine is 6, I just google'd it and found it on the first result page). Create the folder /lib/firmware/gobi if it does not exist and copy the content of the UMTS folder and the content of the folder with you corresponding provider number to /lib/firmware/gobi.
The next step is to install the gobi-loader, which enables the system to load the firmware into your UMTS card. Use "apt-get install gobi-loader" to install it. Afterwards we need to make sure, that the kernel loads the modules on boot, which we need to get the dialup connection ready. Do a "sudo vim /etc/modules" and add two new lines "qcserial" and "usb_wwan" at the end of the file. Save it and leave vim. To test it without rebooting your notebook, put the hardware switch to it's off state and do a "sudo modprobe qcserial" and "sudo modprobe usb_wwan". Then turn it back on and type "dmesg" in your shell. You should see the QUALCOMM lines in the output. Go to your network settings. You should now be able to create a new mobile broadband connection according to your carrier settings. For O2 germany you need to discard the settings that are in the preset and enter "internet" as APN.
Please note that it will always take some time for the gobi loader to get the firmware into the card's memory. This means, that it will take 10-15 seconds for the connection to appear in the network manager.

The keyboard backlight is eady to solve, too. Just edit your /etc/rc.local and add this line somewhere before the "exit 0" line:
echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/devices/platform/sony-laptop/kbd_backlight
This will enable the backlight. If you want to turn it off for any reason just change the "echo 1" to "echo 0".


The screen brightness stuff is still without a real solution. I'v read articles on the web that enable the brightness controls via the fn-shortcuts, but they are made of a bunch of custom scripts, which I did not check yet. The adaptive brightness has no solution known to me. If you find one, please leave a comment.

Follow up (April, 8th 19:32):
I've found a similar article dealing with another VAIO notebook on an older Ubuntu version (9.04). Unfortunately the hint regarding nvclock does not work on newer nvidia cards - they are not supported yet.