Ok. I have 3 main laptops I use. I have my Big Guy (Sony Vaio AR290G) slightly modified with 4gig of ram and 2x 200gig SATA drives. I have my travel one (Sony Vaio SZ430N) and my little guy (Sony Vaio UX280P). My goal, since I have been migrating off of windows, was to get a full working copy of Linux on them that would work for me in day to day tasks (plus allow me some leisure time by playing the games I like to play). My second goal was to get as much of the hardware on these laptops functioning properly under linux.
Since we switched from windows to CentOS/Red Hat on our server side, I decided to try Fedora or CentOS as my desktop. Fedora and CentOS installed fine on all of the machines. I used several sources and got wireless working and the camera functioned intermittently. None of the Sony proprietary buttons worked. The nVidia drivers had issues on both the AR and SZ. Oddly enough, I installed Fedora Core 6 on the UX and got almost everything working flawlessly.
Anyways, I am not a hugely patient person and did not have time to troubleshoot some of the odd goings on on my laptops and I was searching for something that “just worked” as much as possible. So, I then tried Debian 4.0 which had just released. (Oh, BTW, I do have a test laptop an HP DV8339 that I tried these OS’s on first and then tried them on my main laptops)
Debian also installed fine, but again had issues when I tried to get some of the unrecognized hardware to function. The graphics drivers installed but it was a real pain to get GLX and other eye candy going on it. I still had a bitch of a time getting the wireless driver installed and working right. The camera was a pain too.
So, and don’t ask me why, I was really dreading trying Ubuntu. Although, I have read that it’s fairly easy to set up. I went and downloaded Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn and tried that. OMG, almost everything worked right at install. It recognized and installed the wireless drivers and even the Sony Buttons worked for the most part. I went and tried the Ricoh camera drivers and those installed almost flawlessly. I have since put Ubuntu on my SZ and UX with no problems. I put Ubuntu Studio on the AR and that worked great.
In my next blog, I will post how I installed everything and what works and what doesn’t on each of the laptops. Including Bluetooth pairing and using my phone for internet access
