Sony Vaio VGN-FW21E

This is a guide to installing Gentoo on a Vaio VGN-FW21E. Please feel free to update this page when your able to. Off course all editors of this page will not give any guarantees.

The basic installation of Gentoo is the same as described in the handbook. Detail for some specialties follow later in this article.

Hardware
The Sony Vaio VGN-FW21E is an Intel centrino 2 notebook with a P8400 Core 2 Duo. It has 4096MB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive. The graphic is provided by a ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 3470 and the display has a resolution of 1600x900 (16:9).

Below is a detailed summary generated by listing all PCI devices (with lspci)


 * 1) lspci

Internal USB devices (with lsusb from sys-apps/usbutils)


 * 1) lsusb

CPU details:


 * 1) cat /proc/cpuinfo

Basic kernel configuration
Based on gentoo-sources-2.6.30-r3 the following works, but must not be the best solution. For further information about kernel configuration and installing please read the handbook.

Processor
Because it is a dual core processor you have to integrate SMP support. See also this guide for more information about 32 and 64bit settings.

X11 drivers
Follow the radeon guide.

Backlight control
Until support in is introduced vaio-fw21e-backlight2.sh script can be used.

One can set it as a backlight keys response defined in  (  daemon is required) or just run it by hand.

There is also a legacy version which requires the tool which used to be present in the radeonhd driver (perhaps you could try building it?)