Sony Vaio VPCEB24FX laptops come with Marvell ethernet card and Inter wireless cards. lspci says:
04:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Device 4381 (rev 11)
02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Device 422c (rev 35)
In order to see which kernel drivers are required to run these devices, one can paste the output of “lspci -n” into http://kmuto.jp/debian/hcl/ . I did this and found out that the intel wireless device is “Centrino Advanced-N 6200” which requires the iwlagn driver which is there in kernel 2.6.30- . The ethernet card is “80E8059 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller” which requires the sky2 driver which is present in kernel 2.6.33- . I installed Debian lenny which comes with kernel 2.6.26. For the intel wireless card, one can follow the instructions at http://wiki.debian.org/iwlagn . Its bit of a work in order to make the marvell ethernet card work since kernel 2.6.33 or above is not in lenny-backports or not even in sid. But we have 2.6.35-rc6 in debian experimental. In order to install it, add “deb ftp.debian.org/debian experimental main contrib non-free” into /etc/sources.list and then do a “aptitude install linux-image-2.6.35-rc6-686” which installs the 2.6.35 kernel. This worked for me. Some sony vaio laptops come with atheros wireless chipsets. You can have a look at http://wiki.debian.org/ath9k to see how to configure it.
Thanks for people on irc for their help. and thanks also to the dpkg bot on #debian. (we can ask the bot with : “/msg dpkg which driver” for example) 🙂
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