sony-vaio-z-series team mailing list archive

[Justin Karneges <justin@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi guys,

I just wanted report my experience with the latest stable on Z12.  Basically, 
everything more or less seems to work provided you use static switching.  On 
my system, it is enough to use the acpi_osi="" kernel param trick.  But as is 
often mentioned, this may not work for later models and you may need to hack 
your BIOS in that case.

If you don't use static switching then both cards remain powered on and intel 
is the one that gets used (afaict).  You'll also get a black screen during 
boot, which is a little bit scary, and also might be problematic if you use 
LUKS.  But X loads fine eventually.  So it may not be wrong to say that Natty 
works out of the box without any special tricks, but I really do think you 
need to use static switching to feel confident about the system.

Both nvidia and intel cards work.  With nvidia, I seem to need to alt-f7 to 
see boot messages (which is needed for me since I have to enter my LUKS 
passphrase).  Also, brightness controls do not work with nvidia.  Suspend 
works with either card.

Hibernate appears to be a little quirky.  It hung during the hibernate 
process, but restore after reboot "seemed" to work.  I'd stick with suspend 
until the bugs are worked out.

In all, I'm pleased that things are finally working nicely, 9 months after 
buying this computer. :P

Some stats:
  ~13W on stamina during light usage (e.g. this email composition)
  ~30 second boot time:
    15 seconds from pushing the power button to LUKS prompt
    15 seconds from entering passphrase to fully loaded gnome (I have auto-
login set)

Wishlist:
  - brightness control with nvidia
  - hibernate
  - static switching support in the kernel at boot time, to obviate the bios 
tricks

Justin