Frederik Questier

Installing Ubuntu Linux is most often a piece of cake. Not so it seems on Sony latest laptop, the Vaio VPC-Z11-X9E. It’s a wonderful machine, with many new advanced features, but some of the design options seem to be made with only MS Windows in mind (e.g. advanced EFI Bios is crippled towards the end-user and the switch between the 2 GPU’s is badly designed or documented.) That made it a bit of an adventure to get Ubuntu installed. As I am one of the first ones that succeeded, I share my experiences. However I could never have finished this without inspiration from the brightest people, mainly active in the Sony Vaio Z-series Laptop group.
I hope installing Ubuntu will also be easy on this laptop in a few weeks or months. If you can’t wait and love a technical adventure, read on…

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Aim

• Encrypt your passwords and data traffic, e.g. on untrusted (WiFi) networks.
• Avoid changing smtp servers when moving laptop between work and home.
• Pass validation as a machine of your university/company/…

Setup of the tunnel

• We will forward localhost ports over an encrypted tunnel through a ssh server (at our work/university/ISP/…) to our mail and proxyservers over there. (continue reading…)