The Sony Vaio PCG-C1VE page
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Ah.  We switched from assigning an interrupt to the card status change
interrupts (aka management interrupts) to using polling mode.
Unfortunately, this hangs many recent sony vaio systems.  You will
need to assign an irq to the pcic device.  I think it is 11, but I'm
not totally sure.

And indeed that resolved all problems with PCMCIA: Just put the following line in your kernel-config:

device          pcic0   at isa? irq 11

and rebuild and install your kernel. This has been corrected in my kernel-config.

Installation of FreeBSD

swap		 250mb
/		 400mb
/usr		1800mb
/var		 400mb

I wanted to keep my LILO menu in the MBR, so I decided to not overwrite it with the FreeBSD boot manager. My entries in /etc/lilo.conf look like this:

other = /dev/hda1
  label = FreeBSD
  table = /dev/hda

As distribution set I've chosen "User", since I knew I would do a cvsup for everything after the installation. Media was obviously my pccard and I configured it for my private LAN behind my FreeBSD firewall. That's why only "FTP Passive" for use behind a firewall worked.
After a while my system was ready to reboot. The installation procedure was finished.

A few interesting things showed up at the boot process: USB and USB mass storage support already running (detected the Memorystick and of course my floppy drive), pcmcia card working, moused running - I was taken by surprise ;))

Upgrading to FreeBSD -STABLE

As written in the handbook I did a cvsup to -STABLE:

# mkdir /usr/local/etc/cvsup
# cp /usr/share/examples/cvsup/stable-supfile /usr/local/etc/cvsup

I then edited the stable-supfile to achieve the following content:

# That's my local mirror, choose your nearest!
*default host=cvsup.at.FreeBSD.org
*default base=/usr/local/etc/cvsup
*default prefix=/usr
*default release=cvs tag=RELENG_4
*default delete use-rel-suffix
src-all

And then did the cvsup and the built of "world" as written in the handbook:

# cvsup -g -L 2 /usr/local/etc/cvsup/stable-supfile
# cd /usr/src
# make buildworld

For the kernel built I took this kernel configuration file:

# cp ~mic/VAIO /usr/src/sys/i386/conf
# cd /usr/src
# make buildkernel KERNCONF=VAIO
# make installkernel KERNCONF=VAIO
# reboot

This is my rc.conf.
I booted into single user mode to do the rest of the upgrading procedure: At the bootloader prompt (when it counts backwards from 10 to 0) I typed:

# boot -s

At the shell prompt the following:

# mount -a -t ufs
# swapon -a
# cd /usr/src
# make installworld
# mergemaster -i
# reboot

On reboot I got the following dmesg.

Getting the software packages

Hm, should not be an issue here, but I write it anyway ;) First I generated a cvsup file for the ports tree in /usr/local/etc/cvsup:

# Again, this is my local mirror:
*default host=cvsup.at.FreeBSD.org
*default base=/usr/local/etc/cvsup
*default prefix=/usr
*default release=cvs tag=.
*default delete use-rel-suffix
ports-all

And then again up to the newest:

# cvsup -g -L 2 /usr/local/etc/cvsup/ports-supfile

And for every program I wanted to have on it did the following:

# cd /usr/ports
# make search key=[name of program]
# cd [path]/[to]/[program]
# make install clean

Another way is to use the binary-fetching facility of the pkg_add tool:

# pkg_add -r [name of program]

This also checks for dependencies and tries to download the according packages and installes them.
And then I just used the program. This might look similar for Debian Linux users ...

XFree 4.1

First of all I copied /etc/defaults/make.conf to /etc/make.conf and uncommented the following:

CPUTYPE=i586
XFREE86_VERSION=	4

I installed X by using pkg_add -r Xfree86 and took my XF86Config-4 from Linux. I did some changes regarding the mouse devices. Here is my config file. Works like a charm. For TrueType support I took /usr/ports/x11-fonts/webfonts.

Sound

Sound is activated with the driver in the kernel. Use mixer to control the special settings.

The camera software

It's so simple:

# cd /usr/ports/graphics/picturebook
# make install clean

and you have it.

Accessing the longrun features of the Transmeta(TM) CPU

I followed the instructions from Tamotsu HATTORI.

The setbrightness software and the vaiobat program

I took the information from a japanese page which has diff for the linux version of the setbrightness and the vaiobat software. Applied and working ;)

Open issues

There are some open issues I will try to get fixed. If anybody can give me some hints I would be pleased:

• The winmodem: Although there is a page for using the binary driver from linux to get a native freebsd kernel module, it seems to work only on FreeBSD 4.2-RELEASE. The module loads fine, but does not detect my modem.
• IEEE1394: This interface will hopefully be supported in 5.0. If you want to play around with -CURRENT, Tony Grant made a pointer to the following page, where beta drivers can be found.
• APM: APM seems to not work. Well some tweaking with longrun features and setbrightness could do it.

For any comments, recommendations, etc. please feel free to mail to Michael Dosser (mic at netbase.org) ...

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