Peter Vandenabeele

Bought a Sony VAIO CR41Z/R yesterday in Fnac Leuven Belgium (999 EURO incl. VAT).
Nice machine :-)

Spent a few hours to get the _pre-installed_ Windows Vista (SP1) updated and less than 1 hour to get the Ubuntu 8.04 installed next to it.

Issues with Vista:
* downloading the updates after initial fire-up, seemed to take ages
* choices of security settings where not obvious to me
* asking it to shrink its C: partition down from 250 GByte reduced it to nothing less than 136 GByte. Even asking a second time after the first shrink let Vista say that it was not possible to reduce it further down. I was using the documented feature: Start -> Configuration Screen -> System and Maintenance -> System management -> Make and format partitions -> Shrink partition (later on, Ubuntu learned me that there was "only" 22 GBytes used by Vista).
* installing Firefox 3.0 was done in a few minutes, flawlessly.
* Trying to run the Roxio (demo ?) to burn the downloaded Ubuntu iso image failed.

Installing Ubuntu:
* On a separate Linux PC, downloaded the generic Ubuntu 8.04 Desktop iso image (600+ MB) and wrote on disk (cdrecord dev=/dev/cdrom1 driveropts=burnfree -v -data
ubuntu-8.04.1-desktop-i386.iso)
* Rebooted the Vaio and booted from this CD
* Selected Brussels / English as locale
* chose manual for partitioning (automatic would have shrunk the Windows ntfs partition to 23 GByte, but I prefered not to touch the Windows partition to avoid any risk of damage). Selected 80 GB for / and 4 GB for swap, leaving some space for later.
* install took 15 minutes of automagic installation
* rebooted, asked for update; this updated 220 something packages in 15 minutes
* initially, the open source ATI drivers where installed and seemed to work fine. I also tried the restricted drivers for ATI (promising more 2D and 3D acceleration) and these also seemed to work.

Sound works out of the box. Wireless not tested (only wired connectivity here for security reasons). Hibernate and suspend not tested.

Issue with Ubuntu:
One thing that does not seem to work is the set of "blue" buttons to reduce backlighting brightness (on F5 and F6). Other "blue" buttons, e.g. for PgUp, PgDn etc. do work.

Up to now, I am a happy camper as the features that I need, do work :-)
I personally prefer a TrackPoint over a TrackPad, but I use an external mouse anyway.

The Sony VaioCR41Z/R with Ubuntu, Youtube, etc. :