After my adventures with my Vaio Z2 I've been installing Debian on a Vaio Z1 (specificly a VPCZ11Z9RB, a late model Russian version of the VPCZ1, Core i7 cpus, 8Go ram, 256 Go SSD (4x64Go in raid0)).

Installation

I installed Debian stable (Wheezy) from a USB stick (I could have used the DVD I suppose but I had the USB ready).

I'm doing manual partitioning because I want an encrypted volume on the fakeraid with LVM on top of that.

The low points:

  1. The system proposed installing grub on /dev/md, which obviously won't work, I set it to /dev/md126 by hand.

  2. The GRUB install failed. grub-install is not happy about a fakeraid that's handled by mdadm (it seems it can cope either with a fakeraid handled by dm-raid or a software raid handled by mdadm, but a fakeraid handled by mdadm freaks it out).

    The simple solution is to add a new hard-disk entry to /boot/grub/device.map and rerun the grub installation.

    (hd6)	/dev/md126
    

    (This is Debian bug #659460).

  3. After installation I upgraded to sid, which brought in kernel 3.13, and came face to face with:

  4. Debian bug #740933, access to /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:01:00.1/config hang the system.

  5. Also kernel bug 48001, vaio z1 stalls on reboot (regression between 3.4 and 3.5)

All questions to john@AtlanTech.com