Sony Vaio VGN C1

[Michel Talon]

Hello,

i have installed, with a lot of problems FreeBSD-6.2, 32 bits, on a new
Vaio VGN C1 laptop. Some of the problems are obviated, other remain. It
may be of help to mention the solutions, so i post them here. Note the
laptop is *very* well supported under Ubuntu edgy, so it is not at all
Linux unfriendly.

Out of the box FreeBSD doesn't recognize
- the wifi card. I have found an experimental driver which happens to
  work, it is called 20070121-wpi-freebsd.tar.gz. A more recent version
does *not* work (20070125). Strangely the connection to the access point
is more stable with this driver than under Linux or Windows, but the speed is
somewhat lower.
- the wired card. I have found a binary driver on Marvell's site. It is
  called mykbsd60x86-8.12.2.3.tar and works.
- the agp support does not detect the video card, as a consequence i
  don't have Xvideo support, nor hardware opengl. Mplayer suffers from
that. Apparently the PCI ID of the card doesn't appear in agp code, but
appears in drm code (0x27a28086 ).
- i have found a binary driver for the snd_hda sound card, called
sndkld_releng6_i386_lowlatency.tar.gz which works very well to play
sound files, but cannot play music cdroms.

And, cherry on the cake, acpi support is such that suspend to ram kills
the machine and even worse halt -p doesn't halt the machine, and leaves
it spending all the battery. On the other hand machine works nicely, no
overheating, Intel speedstep with cpufreq.ko seems to work. Also 
acpi_sony allows to effectively control screen's brightness.

video: Intel 945GM
wireless: Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 3945
wired: Marvell 88E8036 Fast Ethernet Controller
audio: HDA Codec: Realtek (Unknown)

-- 

Michel TALON