sony-vaio-z-series team mailing list archive

[Chris Cannam <cannam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 5:37 PM, thunderbee <thunderbee@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I'm new to the list; and discovered "nomodeset" thanks to your e-mail.
> Did you make any progress with 10.04?

I am using Arch Linux rather than Ubuntu on this VPC-Z at the moment,
but if you see the "sony_laptop" thread, Xavier discovered that the
problem that had prevented 10.04 (when installed) from working for him
or me was something to do with the use of the grub2 boot loader
instead of "legacy" grub.  When booting via grub2, the screen just
goes blank at mode setting; booting the same kernel via grub1
apparently works.

At the moment I have enough working for the machine to be useful.
Still not as much as I'd like, but enough for me to be spending more
time doing work and less trying to fix the remaining problems.
Suspend/resume hasn't worked for me in any kernel, though the point of
failure has varied.  Intel graphics work, wireless works, brightness
keys can be made to work with a bit of scripting, battery life is poor
because the nVidia is still powered up.

Further to Simon Barber's post about the current mainstream kernel, my
understanding is that the vga-switcheroo code in mainstream does not
actually do anything useful for nVidia/Intel card combinations, but
only for ATI/Intel -- Dave Airlie has been working on this recently,
I've been testing some kernels to see whether i can switch off the
nVidia using one, but nothing that works for normal use yet.  I
haven't yet tried Xavier's suggestion of booting with an older kernel
first.

For those editing the launchpad home page, it is probably worth
mentioning at the top that most of the available information (and
Raphael's script) is directly applicable only to VGN machines, and
especially those that come with Vista.  VGNs updated to Windows 7 and
VPC models seem to be something of a work in progress still.  Indeed
it probably should mention that there _are_ two different models, at
the very least!  At the moment the page gives the impression that you
can buy a new Z series and get Linux working well on it
straightforwardly, and this is not really true.


Chris