This page contains a few notes about how I installed Debian 3.0 (woody) on a Z600 NE Sony laptop. It's not meant to be comprehensive, since there are several other "linux on PCG-Z600NE" pages out there, but it details a few problems specific to Debian and to network installs and any other areas of difficulty I had.
I wanted to do a network install. Unfortunately the boot floppies don't work, because I only had a USB floppy drive. The rescue floppy boots OK, but when it asks you to insert the disk with the rescue.bin image, it can't mount the floppy drive ("Unable to mount root fs on 02:00"). I guess there's no USB support in the boot floppies kernel.
My next plan was to use a bootable CDROM containing the boot floppies. I used boot.iso from http://people.debian.org/~dwhedon/boot-floppies/. This booted the installation system OK, but when it came to trying to "install foreign modules" to load the network drivers, it still looked for floppy disks. It turns out the network drivers are on the cdrom, but in a tar file which needs manually extracting.
Rebooting and entering linux ide2=0x180,0x386 at the rescue disk's LILO boot prompt allowed me to go to a second virtual terminal during the debian installer, mount the CDROM (I think it came up as /dev/hde), and find the modules tar file which I extracted to "/target" (the empyt partition I'd setup as the installation target. Once there, I extracted modules.tgz, modconf.tgz and pcmcia.tgz into /target, so you end up with the modules in /target/lib/modules... At this point a reboot may be necessary, I'm not sure. After the reboot,you should be able to use the "Configure Device Drivers/Modules" option in the installer and select the "eepro100" network card module. After that you should be able to setup the network interface and continue with the network install.
Note that it would probably be a whole lot easier to just burn a CD of the full Debian install (first CD only), so that you get can a basic system installed straight from CD, rather than trying to do it over the network. You can then fetch the rest of the system over the network
Choosing the "neomagic" driver during the XFree86 setup during the debian installation produced a working X with the exception that the mouse pointer was corrupted. Setting Option "SWCursor" "true" in the appropriate place in my XF86Config-4 file sorted that out. I also added a second mouse entry so I can use the touchpad and external USB mouse together. Here's a copy of my XF86Config-4 if it's any help to you.
Update 2005: I'm now running Ubuntu (Breezy) on this machine, mainly using an external display. Funny thing is, in Windows this machine will only go up to 1024x768 on the external display, without dropping down to 8-bit colour. In Linux, it runs at 1280x1024 with 16 bit colour, no problem! My xorg.conf. I think there is something slightly unusual about the video timings on the external display. On some screens, its works fine with the built-in video modes. But when I switched to a Samtron 73V, I wasn't able to get a good image until I modified the modeline, as indicated in the xorg.conf.
I had some trouble with this. Per Klevnäs tells me:
If you want sound on yours, go to http://www.linuxorbit.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=541 In the end, I didn't use the method suggested there, it didn't work (got the error on this page: http://www.mail-archive.com/alsa-user@lists.sourceforge.net/msg11177.html). It worked when using a more recent source, however, downloaded from http://www.alsa-project.org/download.php3. I compiled it against debian kernel headers, though. When all's set, use module ymfpci and it should just work.