Sony Vaio
Setting Up the Machine

How to get into BIOS setup: JoelP replies, assuming you have Windows 8, power it off, then press the Assist key, in the top row above the Delete key. The machine will power up and will show a screen with options for setup. booting. and various other possibilities. If you have Windows 7 you can press F2 for setup, or F8 for boot options.

For me booting Linux, the Assist key worked as described. The Assist screen also has the model, serial number and service tag.

Changed settings in BIOS setup:

• Main menu: Gives BIOS version, model and serial number. 8Gb RAM, 750Gb disc.

• Advanced menu:

  • Intel Virtualization: was disabled, I turned it on.
  • Already enabled: execute-disable, separate graphics, USB, card slot, optical disc, WiFi, LAN
  • Intel Anti-Theft was disabled and I left it off.

• Security Menu:

  • Passwords: not set, and I didn't set them.
  • TPM was enabled, I disabled it (I hope).
  • Secure Boot is enabled (but ignored if mode = Legacy).
  • Secure Boot Mode = Standard (vs. Custom).

• Boot menu:

  • Boot Mode was UEFI, changed to Legacy.
  • External Device was disabled, changed to enabled. This is for a USB memory stick.
  • Network Boot is disabled.
  • Boot order was: HDD, external, optical, network.
    Changed to: external, optical. HDD, network.

• Exit Menu: Saved changes, then Exit.

And it boots off the installation CD; no hassles about an unsigned booter.

I have a paranoid firewall that includes MAC registration. I went through the registration procedure, and the server then delivered the SuSE distro content to the new machine.

I'm doing a network installation with wired Ethernet.

SuSE installation settings:

• Timezone: US/Pacific; also set the time server to 192.9.200.193.

• Partitioning: As received it had a GPT disc label (versus DOS MBR) with these partitions:

  sda	699Gb	(whole disc)
  sda1	260Mb	Sony system stuff
  sda2	1.44Gb	Windows RE Tools
  sda3	260Mb	EFI Boot
  sda4	128Mb	Microsoft Reserved
  sda5	243Gb	NTFS (I think originally was 658Gb)
  sda6	350Mb	NTFS
  sda7	37Gb	NTFS Recovery
  Remainder proposed to be allocated to Linux.

  I kept the GPT label, but repartitioned like this:

  sda	750Gb	(Whole disc, it expanded!)
  sda1	21.5Gb	Root
  sda2	215Gb	/home
  sda3	17.2Gb	Swap
  sda4	497Gb	/s1 (rest of disc)

  In the SuSE partitioner, if you ask for 20Gb it will inflate this consistently by 7.5% so you get 21.5Gb. Of this, about 5% is used for overhead (inode storage and free block list) and 2.5% is reserved for root, leaving the available storage about equal to the requested amount.

  Each partition is labelled and is mounted by label.

• Software: add m4 and expect.

• Installation Summary: Enable ssh and open a hole for it in the SuSE firewall (which I will replace later).

• Installation proceeded with no problems. Sneeze and you'll miss it. This machine is fast.

• In the second phase after boot (auto configuration), skip all network card configuration: it would do ISDN, modems, PPOE, none of which 21st century systems have.

• After YaST setup, using X-Windows for root, window manager is IceWM and the font is teensy.

• I used YaST2 to reconfigure the wired and wireless nets.

  • Xena should use DHCP.
  • Change the device names to eth0, wlan0. The firewall recognizes these for special treatment.
  • Enter hardwired wireless net parameters.
  • But wlan0 ought to be managed by NetworkManager. Turn this on.
  • For the virtual machine we need a bridge, and eth0 should be in it. See below for wlan0. I ended up configuring this in both ifup conf files (YaST2) and NetworkManager.

• Post_jump executed normally.

Checkout.sh found several discrepancies:

• The canonical form of the IPv6 address must appear in /etc/hosts. No leading zeroes.

• It was not accepting RFC 2464 auto IPv6 addressing. Eventually fixed.

• No longer can you add a wireless NIC to a bridge. I haven't yet figured out what I'm going to do about this.

• It needed Xena's SSL host key to be reinstalled.

• Since syslog.service is officially bypassed, that test was skipped. Need to do the test whichever syslog variant is enabled.

• Needed to add Xena as a Kerberos KDC, a LDAP server, and a DNS NS. [Done]

• Slapd (LDAP) was hosed. Based on prior experience I just copied /var/lib/ldap from Jacinth to Xena, and it worked.

• It's still disorganized about boot scripts:

  • network6.service: wanted but not enabled. Only for Jacinth!
  • NetworkManager-wait-online.service: wanted but not enabled.
  • NetworkManager-dispatcher.service: enabled; what is this? D-bus interface to control NetworkManager. Wanted.
  • dbus-org.freedesktop.nm-dispatcher.service: enabled; what is this? Alias for the above; bypass it.
  • (All fixed in scripts.extra.)