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Model name: Sony VAIO VPCCB15FG

Hardware
Intel Core i5 2410 @ 2.30ghz
Intel HM 65 Express chipset
4GB RAM, 500GB 7200 Toshiba HD
Hybrid graphics AMD Radeon 6630M 1GB DDR3 VRAM / Intel HD 3000
Matshita DVD RW, 15.5” 1920×1080 Full HD WLED screen
ATHEROS WLAN and Ethernet
Realtek Audio, Exmor 1.3MP webcam
HDMI and VGA output. 1 USB 3.0

Installation
Install Media: Fedora 15 64bit DVD

Installation went smooth.
This is the state just after installation,

Sound: Works. Recording: Works.
External monitor via VGA and HDMI: Works in both extended and mirrored fashion. You can use both LCD and external monitor, or LCD ON and external OFF in either mirrored or extended fashion, by using the accelerator buttons. But i couldn’t find a way to switch off the LCD and use only the external monitor.
Accelerator Buttons: Sound+/-, mute, screen brightness+/-, Screen->External monitor, hibernate works. Touchpad On/off and Zoom buttons dont work.
Atheros WLAN: Works. ON/OFF switch: Works.
Atheros Ethernet: Not tested.
Bluetooth: *Not working*. Bluetooth settings show ‘device disabled’
USB 2.0/3.0: Works.
Card Reader: Not tested.
Touchpad: Works fine. Mouse clicks and two finger scrolling works after enabling in the GNOME3 settings.
Webcam: Works.
DVD drive: To Do
Suspend: Works.
Hibernate: Works.

Hybrid graphics: Fedora 15 includes vgaswitchroo module and switching OFF the Radeon card manually works fine. However, when switching to the Radeon from the integrated card, GNOME3 fails to load.

To switch off the Radeon card use the command,

[root@localhost ~]# echo OFF > /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch

It can be confirmed whether the card is switched OFF by checking the remaining battery time before and after that command. There will be a difference of ~1.5hrs.

Some issues
Fedora comes with a default Radeon driver. However this seems to have a problem and sometimes during boot the system hangs at “dracut : starting plymouth deamon”. I found a dirty solution read here

As GNOME3 doesnt work with Radeon driver. No 3D support available.

Screen brightness gets reset to maximum after every restart.

..

For those who are interested here is the lspci of the VPCCB15FG

[root@localhost ~]# lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Sandy Bridge DRAM Controller (rev 09)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Sandy Bridge PCI Express Root Port (rev 09)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Device 0116 (rev 09)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Cougar Point HECI Controller #1 (rev 04)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation Cougar Point USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 (rev 04)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Cougar Point High Definition Audio Controller (rev 04)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cougar Point PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev b4)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cougar Point PCI Express Root Port 2 (rev b4)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cougar Point PCI Express Root Port 3 (rev b4)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cougar Point PCI Express Root Port 4 (rev b4)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation Cougar Point USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 (rev 04)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Cougar Point LPC Controller (rev 04)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Cougar Point 6 port SATA AHCI Controller (rev 04)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation Cougar Point SMBus Controller (rev 04)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Device 6741 (rev ff)
02:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR9285 Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01)
03:00.0 SD Host controller: Ricoh Co Ltd Device e823 (rev 04)
03:00.1 System peripheral: Ricoh Co Ltd Device e232 (rev 04)
04:00.0 USB Controller: NEC Corporation uPD720200 USB 3.0 Host Controller (rev 04)
05:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Device 1083 (rev c0)

—

I recently did a yum update firefox. This caused my FF to be updated to 3.6 from the earlier 3.0.
Very soon i noticed that while browsing certain sites, i was getting logged out from the X server. The FF seemed to crash my X server.

One such site was this: http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/VNC-Server

A quick google search reveals that this is a known issue with the the video driver.
The solution was to update the CentOS to the latest 5.5.

However, a quick fix can be done,
Add the following line to the ‘Device‘ section of your xorg.conf file (/etc/X11/xorg.conf).
Option    "XAANoOffscreenPixmaps" "true"
Restart X by Ctrl-Alt-Backspace

Check out the problem page again.

In some computers it might also be required to add this line too
Option     "AccelMethod" "XAA"

You can set the different startup options as X resources (typically in your .Xdefaults file) or in a file named XBoard in your home directory.
A typical option sometimes has two names; a short name and a long name. Short names cannot be specified in the initialization file, they are used by typing them on the shell command line you use to start xboard.

The format of the file contains, one option per line like,
XBoard*longOptionName attributeIfAny

For Boolean options it is,
XBoard*longOptionName: True

My XBoard file,

[tony@localhost ~]$ cat XBoard
XBoard*searchDepth 5
XBoard*searchTime 0:5
XBoard*showThinking: True
XBoard*showCoords: True
XBoard*internetChessServerInputBox: True
XBoard*ponderNextMove: False 

The full list of available options can be found in man Xboard

If you play over ICS (Internet chess server) frequently, you could create a .icsrc file in your home directory so that XBoard feeds the file’s contents to the ICS as commands upon connecting.
Usually the first two lines of the file should be your ICS username and password. This will automatically log you in to ICS upon connecting.

Here is mine,

[tony@localhost ~]$ cat .icsrc
tonyjjose
myPassword
games

The third command games just prints a list of the ongoing games.

Btw it may be also very useful to create an application launcher (shortcut icon).
In GNOME, Rightclick on Desktop > Create Launcher
Type : Application in Terminal
Name: XBoard ICS
Command: xboard -ics -icshost freechess.org

Ok done. 1.E4 E5!

Modern webpages reference resources from many domains. So time for DNS lookups can cause significant delay in browsing.

These days i was having slow internet speeds, and i suspect its due to bad performance by my ISP’s DNS server.

The speed of DNS lookup can be determined by the dig command combined with a time command,

[root@localhost ~]# time dig @10.0.0.1 www.yahoo.co.in
......
rc.a07.yahoodns.net.    148     IN      A       87.248.120.14
.....
real    0m0.607s
.....

replace 10.0.0.1 with your DNS server’s IP address.

you could also use nslookup instead of dig

[root@localhost ~]# time nslookup www.yahoo.co.in 8.8.8.8
.....
Address: 87.248.120.148
.....
real    0m0.366s
.....

Here i am checking the resolution time taken from GoogleDNS

You could compare the performance of your DNS server with some of the free open DNS servers like, GoogleDNS(8.8.8.8), OpenDNS(208.67.222.222)

Make sure you test with less commonly used domains as the common ones will be already cached in the DNS server’s cache.

I just wanted to extract the USB boot image from the .iso of the CentOS DVD image that i downloaded.

Now i mounted it by

[root@localhost ~]# mkdir /mnt/iso
[root@localhost ~]# mount /home/dloads/CentOS-5.2-i386-bin-DVD.iso /mnt/iso/ -t iso9660 -o loop,ro

ro mounts it read only so that we dont accidentally make no changes.
loop is required to mount it as a loop device (so as to access the file as a block device).