Sony VAIO Pro 13, Linux, WiFi

As I have written recently, my latest workforce laptop is a Sony VAIO Pro 13. At that time I posted something in the sense that with an update of the firmware my Wifi problems were resolved. Unfortunately this is not true. I had many problems running the latest release kernel 3.14, connections very instable, slow, or not existent.

But this is solved!

The whole magic is, if you want to run 3.14 kernel, that you also have to pull in the wireless-testing patches. Together with the patches for sony-laptop from Mattia Dongili, one can get a fully working setup.

Here is my current kernel-config file. It might contain a few more drivers than necessary, but it contains everything (AFAIK) for the laptop, and also everything necessary to run systemd.

To get the sources, do more or less the following:
$ git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git
$ cd linux
$ git checkout v3.14
$ git pull git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/linville/wireless-testing.git
$ git pull git://git.taihen.jp/linux-sony-2.6.git for_3.15
and then build your custom kernel as usual, using either my config file from above or something similar.

As far as I can see, linux kernel 3.15 will contain all of the above and thus will work out of the box. We are still pre-rc1, but most of the patches are already in there, good so. Probably due to the rumor that Linus himself owns one of these laptops, which means he want’s to see all the functionality properly working soon ;-).

If you need more information on how to initially get your Linux, in my case Debian, up and running on this laptop, see my previous post on it.

Anyway, with this setup I am now very happy!