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The PCG-Z600NE would boot from the Ubuntu CD but once Linux had booted it locked up.

Linux was hanging at attempting ACPI stuff, I discovered this by removing "quiet splash " from the F6 Boot prompt, so I replaced that with "acpi=off" and Linux booted but dropped me into a shell rather than running the install.

Linux was not finding the PCMCIA PC Card CD-ROM, /dev/cdrom did not exist, nore did /dev/hdc. Adding ide2=0x180,0x386 did not make the CD work.

After much head scratching I copied the contents of the CD onto a 2GB USB flash disk, booted from the CD and at the F6 Boot prompt I entered removed the "quiet splash " parameters and added "acpi=off INSTALL_MEDIA_DEV=/dev/sda1".

The install, although rather slow off the USB flash disk, went smoothly.

At the next boot I had to edit the grub configuration to add "acpi=off", and when the laptop booted I edited /boot/grub/menu.lst to include that option.

Everything appears to be working, including the screen, sound, PCMCIA PC Card (it finds the Sony PCGA-CD51/A CD-ROM and a Buffalo 802.11B WiFi card), ALPS glide pad, USB. Not tried firewire or Memory Stick yet. There does seem to be an issue with it not turning the laptop off when I shutdown.

Later I installed the following:

$ sudo apt-get install vlc
$ sudo apt-get install eclipse
$ sudo apt-get install autofs
$ sudo apt-get install smbfs