Many people like VAIO laptops, and there is a number of factors for that: neat appearance, nice performance, compactness etc. But under linux recent VAIOs bring quite a big amount of pain to make them work with all laptopish functionality: Fn keys, power management etc. So before you buy one VAIO - consider these factors first and read multiple reviews which you can find on the web about VAIOs. That was just a Warning

I really like VAIOs which I have in my hands now:

1. PCG-N505VE, which is almost the perfect laptop for travel - has USB, IR, small in size, light in weight. All features work like a charm: USB, IR, Fn keys, power management, so there is almost nothing to discuss, and I leave that for others. The only disadvantage that it is old and not powerfull, but with extended memory size (128M) it still makes a nice travel friend.
2. PCG-R505TS. This buddy brings a lot of questions to your linux box, especially because in the model (as in the rest of recent VAIOs) Sony decided to be modern and get rid of APM support, by obligating ACPI to handle all power management. The bad thing is that Linux's ACPI support barely exist. You can find more on the web pages about that. I could not manage to make my function keys work, could not make it suspend to the RAM (swsusp to hdd supposed to work but I didn't try it yet) and the most disturbing thing is that my wireless conflicts with sonypi in recent 2.5.xx kernels, so it hangs laptop completely if I try to load sonypi after orinoco already functioning. Probably I need to play with IRQs to make it work.

   What I've accomplished (which is not much at all) is to recompile DSDT table while correcting couple of errors in it. Don't know if it really helped in anything but here is the fixed DSDT: original, fixed, diff, HEX file to include in linux kernel and complete patch for the kernel source . You might want to install patched DSDT into your kernel, as described in ACPI FAQ or just by using the patch I've provided.