# Anyone tried installing on a Sony Vaio PictureBook C1VE?

## mattsullivan

Hello all,

I'd like to install GenToo on my C1VE, but have had bad experiences in the past installing Linux on the machine, and always had to revert back to Win2K. Has anyone tried installing on this machine and if so, what problems are there, especially configuring for the non-standard screen size of the laptop?

Thanks,

Matt

----------

## rorrim

You are in for a tough time.  I just installed Gentoo on my extra C1VN, and it wasn't easy.

I have a C1VN with the optional PCMCIA CD-ROM.  Unfortunately since there is only one PC-Card slot, you can't have the CD-ROM and ethernet cards in at the same time.  On top of that, the slow Transmeta processor makes for very long compile times.

After a lot of fruitless effort, I finally gave up trying to install on the PictureBook itself.  I pulled out the hard drive and put it in my Fujitsu where I did the full installation.  Then I moved the hard drive back to the Picturebook and finished the setup for the unique hardware.

To give you an idea of the time it takes to compile on the older Transmeta ... KDE 3.1 took almost three days and was completely unusable (slow) once it was complete.

----------

## Carlos

I searched Linux on Laptops and found the following sites about Linux on the C1VE:

http://www-jcsu.jesus.cam.ac.uk/~mma29/c1/

http://org.netbase.org/vaio/The latter doesn't have very much stuff on it, but the first is quite informative, and in both cases they didn't seem to have too many problems.

Actually, they seem to have gotten so much stuff working with the thing (camera and memory stick slot, for example) that I'm tempted to buy this instead of the Fujitsu I was contemplating...

Anyway, I'd definitely recommend that you install Gentoo on it, and if you do, good luck.

----------

## Carlos

 *rorrim wrote:*   

> I have a C1VN with the optional PCMCIA CD-ROM.  Unfortunately since there is only one PC-Card slot, you can't have the CD-ROM and ethernet cards in at the same time.

 Oh, forgot about that part.  The easy thing to do in that kind of situation - in my opinion - is to install something like Slackware (since that can be done in a matter of minutes), then connect the ethernet card and install Gentoo with chroot.  There's also a way to install with a grub bootdisk; in both cases check out the Alternative Installation Guide.

 *Quote:*   

> To give you an idea of the time it takes to compile on the older Transmeta ... KDE 3.1 took almost three days and was completely unusable (slow) once it was complete.

 If you can use distcc to help the laptop with the compilations, I'd definitely suggest that you do so.

----------

## delugen

I'm in the process of finishing up my C1VN gentoo install. (estimating 4/5 complete)

rorrim is right about it being a pain, and if I had known a little more about gentoo before starting, I probably would have gone the route that Carlos suggested, by using an alternate distro to jumpstart the process. having only one pcmcia slot was really limiting, in this case.

as it was, I ended up removing the harddrive and using a spare tower machine to do the base install. (handy little adapters are available for attaching IDE laptop drives to standard desktop IDE cables). taking apart the c1vn isn't fun, but it definitely took less time to use a 900mhz athlon system for a stage1 install than it would have on the 600mhz crusoe.

(rorros, you might want to look at these two threads concerning your extremely sluggish system: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=1679 and https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=2004 )

once the base system was up, I made sure the proper ethernet drivers were on the drive somewhere, stuck the drive back into the c1vn, set up the net drivers properly, and went from there. (actually, the first thing I did before taking care of the ethernet drivers was to recompile the kernel with Crusoe support. I made a safe generic kernel based on i586 while the system was running on the athlon machine.)

once you get the base system running, things are close to standard procedure afterwards. there are a bunch of places to find posted XF86Config files that you can draw from to get the correct 1024x480 display in X (I can post the one I found if anyone wants it; it worked like a charm), and lots of helpful support for other C1VN/E specific hardware. I'm actually adding jogdial support right now, and am going to tackle the built-in camera immedaitely after.

use google to search for c1vn/e linux pages, you'll come up with a lot of information.

----------

