Nausea Medialis

Yeah you read that right! I got this fancy thing (TZ190 N, pictures) a few weeks ago, but since I have to work too, it took some time to put the penguin on it ^_^. Sony was never known for its standard compliance and the Vaio TZ seems to be a prime example of that. None of the Fn keys work. In-depth coverage of the issues I have/had with this laptop are covered here. You'll find the specs there too. However, let's look at this marvel from the positive side :-).

This baby is my precious :-P. Seriously! A real gem. Sony is one of the few manufacturers to pack so much heat in such a small package. Carbon chassis, LED backlit X-brite LCD, Core 2 Duo ULV, an abundant 2 GB of RAM, draft N wireless, and - the icing on the cake - an SSD :-).

Arch has this wonderful hook called 'encrypt' that allows you to unlock your encrypted root partition with an external key if you want so. The problem is this implementation is rather rigid - the encrypt hook can only handle one partition and corresponding key for now (actually it can only handle a root partition by default). My 'hack' allows non-root partitions to get mounted automatically without having to resort to /etc/crypttab for unlocking information, but that is a weak point at the same time: you cannot have multiple encrypted partitions with this method - unless, of course, you continue to use /etc/crypttab.