Installing Linux on Sony Vaio PCG-505F

Here are my notes for installing Debian Linux on my Sony Vaio PCG-505F.

November 1999

After using my Sony Vaio PCG-505F running Debian Linux 2.0 for almost a year, I decided to reinstall Debian so as to upgrade to Debian 2.1. I first made a backup copy of my home, root, /usr/local, and portions of /etc directory that I had modified. I did this by making copies to my dos partition.

I did the reinstall using the floppy install method. I downloaded the 7 base14-*.bin files, resc1440tecra.exe, drv1440tecra.bin, and rawrite2.exe. Then I rebooted Windows98 into DOS mode and used the following DOS commands to write the floppies.

format a: rawrite2 -f [file] -d a:
I also made a hard copy of the /etc/fstab and /etc/lilo.conf. I booted using the resc1440tecra.exe floppy and did the Linux install. I did not select the pcmcia set during the initial install. Then I downloaded and reinstalled, using dpkg, applications packages which I use.

Mounting floppy and cd-rom

I have been able to mount my floppy and cd-rom using by adding the following lines to /etc/fstab. 
/dev/fd0	/floppy		msdos	defaults,user,nosuid,noauto  0      0
/dev/hdc        /cdrom          iso9660 r                            0      0
Then when I want to use either the floppy or cdrom under Linux, I just do 'mount /floppy' or 'mount /cdrom'. Linux 2.1 seems to allow hot-swapping of the external floppy and cdrom.

December 1998

Here are my notes for installing Debian Linux 2.0 on my Sony Vaio PCG-505F - minus all the mistakes and the wrong turns that I took!. I began the installation in December 1998 and ... am still working on it.

My 505F came standardly configured (32M RAM), plus I purchased the optional CD player that connects through the PCMCIA slot. As it turns out, I did not need the CD player to install Linux.

Partitioning the Hard Disk

First, I had to partition the hard disk. The 505 comes with a 4G hard disk, all as one Windows98 (FAT32) partition. I wanted to keep Win98 installed on part of my machine, so that I could play games and also so I could still be connected to the Internet (at least till I got Linux up and connected to the Internet).

While I could not make a complete backup of my Win98 partition before beginning, I did make a rescue/boot floppy. This came in very handy during several stages of the Linux installation! (When I made wrong turns!)

I downloaded the fips20.exe and restorrb.exe program from the Debian installation site. I then ran the Win98 disk defragmenter. Then I shutdown the machine and turned it on again, coming up in DOS mode. I then ran fips20.exe. I first split the /dev/hda1 partition into two parts:

/dev/hda1 1506 (where Win98 lived)
/dev/hda2 2510 (intended for Linux)
I left both partitions be FAT32 (because I planned to split the hda2 drive again and fips will only work on DOS partitions). Also note that only one partition can be "bootable" so I left /dev/hda1 be the boot partition.

I rebooted into Win98 and formated the /dev/hda2 partition (called the D: drive by Win98). I then exited, came back up in DOS mode, ran fips20.exe again and split the /dev/hda2 partition so that now my partition table looked like

/dev/hda1 1506 (Win98)
/dev/hda2 2355 (Linux)
/dev/hda3 155 (Linux swap)
As it turns out I could have made the Linux swap be even smaller - I found out later that Linux would only let me have a swap space about 135 Megs. Initially I had made my swap space much bigger. It was at this point that I needed restoreb.exe and the copies of the partition table that fips20 saves on floppy. One hint on putting things back together to get back to the original manufacturer state - first use fips to change the partitions back to FAT32, reformat the drives, and ONLY THEN use restorrb.exe to restore the partition table (otherwise Win98 thinks the non-FAT32 space is "in-use").

Installing Basic Linux

I tried to install Linux using the CD player and the CDs I got from Linux Press with the book "The Debian Linux User's Guide". The installation failed in the middle, probably because the installation program does not have the drivers for the PCMCIA card through which the CD player communicates with the 505F.

I next tried to install by downloading the necessary files to my hard disk listed in the Debian installation manual and installing from my hard disk. I was not successful at this, possibly because I did not use the correct rescue/boot program. I then put the necessary programs on floppy disk (using rawrite2.exe) and used them to install basic linux. STRONG HINT - the 505F seems to need the resc1440tecra.exe as the rescue/install program.

I had no problem with the install from floppy disk, choosing the defaults when I was not sure what to do. I choose the default install LILO option, not realizing that besides installing this boot manager in the Linux partition that it would also overwrite the DOS partition's Master Boot Record (MBR) with Debian's mbr, a simple boot manager. Thus I lost the normal Win98 boot scripts that I had been using to go directly into DOS.

LILO

To use LILO to boot both Linux and Win98 edit /etc/lilo.conf to change the line
delay=20
to
prompt timeout=100
and add the following lines at the bottom
other=/dev/hda1
label=win
table=/dev/hda
then run /sbin/lilo so that the changes are picked up. This will give you a minimal setup so you can use both Win98 and Linux. You can read more about how to configure LILO in /usr/doc/ppp.

Downloading Linux packages

Once you have the basic portion of Linux installed, one can download futher Linux packages (and you probably will want to).

It may take a while to figure out how to use the Linux communication software to connect to the Internet. Instead, one can use the already installed Win98 communication software. By mounting the dos partition via Linux, one can copy the downloaded software to a Linux partition.

To do this, edit /etc/fstab, add the following line, and reboot:

/dev/hda1 /mnt msdos defaults 0 0

Installing Linux packages

Linux packages can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/. If you want the packages from the main Linux 2.0 distribution, go to ftp://ftp.debian.org/debian/hamm/main/binary-i386/. A list of packages is in the file 'Packages'. Some packages depend on other packages being installed first. To see the list of installed packages, use the command 'dpkg -l'. Use 'dpkg -i [name].deb' to install a package. If there is a dependency problem, dpkg will tell you which packages are needed. Go and get those packages, install them, and then install the package you want.

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