Sony VAIO SR

Do you know how to enable hdaps on vaio SR19?
btw vaiopower doesn't work too.

My main complaint is not the scan rate of B/W or grayscale scans. I would be very happy with a 10 PPM grayscale document scanner. The problem is that the scanner / software package does NOT scan in grayscale. The scanner DOES send the images to my iMac in GRAYSCALE and then the horrible software converts it to B/W. Yes you heard me right! They take a perfectly legible (8 bit, 256 levels of black) grayscale image and turn it into a very poor quality B/W (2 bit, 2 color) illegible image. I can't for the life of me understand why they would do such a thing.See Here: neatdesk scanner

Very good laptop ! I love its keyboard !

I use Gentoo Linux distribution and I compile kernel 2.6.30 to get bightness control functions keys working. I didn't try to use everything on this laptop (firewire, memory card, fingerprint reader, 56K modem) but all the others features are OK.

Update:

• FN-Keys will work with kernel 2.6.30-rc2 and up
• Mode-Switching keys will work from kernel 2.6.30-rc2 and up (Mode/Setting and the rightmost custom launch key may be unbound in X, the other four launch keys should generate events even in X by default though)
• Screen brightness at start-up is fixed in 2.6.29 and up (and at resume in 2.6.30-rc2) and up
• If you see flickering video playback in X with the fglrx driver, you can use 'Option 'TexturedVideo' 'Off'” in the device section of x.org.
• The fingerprint scanner can actually work with the new 'fprint' software. This will be by available (and integrated with login – e.g. gdm) by default in newer distributions.
• To get the soundcard to work properly pass (auto-muting internal audio when you plug-in headphones, microphone) in you alsa.cnf set the correct model: “option snd-hda-intel model=sony-assamd”

Also: you might want to play around a bit with 'powertop' and follow the instructions for energy saving there. I can get around 3,5 hours of battery life with the screen reasonably dimmed and some of the additional tweaks suggested by powertop.

The following regards the (newer) SR39VN/S model.

Hardware Differences:

Processor: 2.40 GHz
Memory: 4GB RAM
Harddisk: 400GB HDD
Graphics: ATI Radeon HD3470

Conclusions:

I can confirm what is written above. I was actually pleasantly
surprised to find that almost everything works! Things that
do not work are (relatively) minor things. See the minor notes
below.

A bit of a bigger issue is the fact that the fan is a bit more
noisy in GNU/Linux than in the proprietary OS that was pre-installed.
There is no way to directly control the fans. I suspect this can be
fixed however by changes to the sony-laptop kernel module (I am looking
into this).

Minor Notes:

• Not all FN-Keys work. The following do NOT work:
  • Brightness controls (can be controlled via software)
  • Display Switching (you can configure this via software)
  • Zoom
  • Suspend to Disk (can be done via software, untested)
• Mode Switching Keys do not work
• Adjusting Screen Brightness Works, but is reset to default (full on) when (re)booting or coming out of suspend.
• The best video driver to use right now is the proprietary fglrx driver. This will be replaced at some point by the open source (accelerated) radeonhd driver.
• fglrx: video playback works but there is no XV Acceleration, therefore minor 'tearing' may be visible. This is not really disturbing though (might be fixed in the newer radeonhd driver)
• The microphone does not seem to be working out of the box. (I suspect this is easily fixable, have not looked into it yet)
• The fingerprint scanner does not work (and is apparantly hidden in device listings such as 'lsusb').