sony vaio x505, ready for trips

when i got it 2 christmas ago, vaio x505 came with winXP and since then, it's been home to fedora core 3, soon to be upgraded to newly released fedora core 5.

for the longest time, through my lazyness and ignorance, the thin laptop wasn't able to play any video clips, which frustrated me to take it to daily commutes from sf to south bay, nor to long flights across continent to some conferences.

last week, i finally put my foot down, and spent some time, trial & erro method with reading up articles online.

after a few attempts, i became more familiar with reading for audio devices from /dev, or from lsmod, and what audio card came with vaio as pcmcia. i've also tried creating the audio user & group, most likely in redundancy, and downloaded a few tools including alsa-mixer, tried to recompile audio kernel modules for latest kernel installed on the laptop.

recompiling or creating user/group were not necessary, and lsmod/dmesg and reading through log indicates that device is located properly. some gnome problem to get the sound volume control, or any audio/video tools to open up got fixed. everything seem fine, and i can open mplayer for video output, but no sound.

i've tried to launch alsa-mixer as was mentioned on some online articles, to no avail.

finally i ran into http://www.csanyi.net/wiki/space/x505+linux+install today, and it just was matter of turning on or off external amplifier or headphone using checkbox. hehe.

now i'm set for daily commutes & long drive/flights.

still left homeworks are AVI conversion to MPEG and DVD burning on mac.

and, setting up mac mini for the best usage.