Dear Tristan, To answer your question, I would think so. For most people (including myself), the main issue was related to the graphic card (and the fact that booting an old kernel, you would either end up with a blank screen, psychedelic screen, or a frozen system). Most of the time, by providing some parameters to grub at boot time, you would manage to boot the system and start a shell (just enough operating system, allowing you to install packages of kernel-2.6.38). Hence my comment on being comfortable with tinkering your OS (and using the command line).
Once kernel 2.6.38 is installed, you should be able to boot into graphic mode (with the intel drivers) and from there continue the configuration of your system (adding/removing extra software). Once you have a basic working system (graphic card, network, sound), the next challenge is to get the switching of the graphic card working. This is both a smaller and a bigger issue. smaller: actually your system will be perfectly usable without doing anything else, but you will notice that both (integrated and discreet) graphic cards are enable and that you battery will drain quickly. And maybe your workflow requires you to use the discreet (nvidia) graphic card (I actualy seldom use the nvidia cards, using my laptop mostly for web development, so for me it was not a big issue). So if you are lazy and/or use your laptop plugged all the time and do not really need the discreet graphic card, you can simply ignore the issue for the time being and wait for the distro to come up with an elegant solution. bigger: because it involves installing the sony-laptop module, several set of libraries to support both graphic cards, to install script of program to detect at boot time which card is running and ensuring that the proper libraries are in use. There is no universal solution yet (but it might come as more and more laptop with such configuration are released on the market), and therefore you may have to do a lot of tinkering if you are not using Ubuntu or Fedora (I have not seen a lot of information about people using Mandriva or OpenSuse, but since I am using Ubuntu I will confess I did not dig the issue further). Sylvain 2011/3/31 Tristan Muntsinger <[email protected]> > Thanks for the advice! The distros I was thinking about were Mandriva, > OpenSuSE, Fedora, Kubuntu, and Debian. I assume by your response that I > would have equal luck with the other 3? > > -Tristan > > > > -- Wiki: http://linux-on-sony-vaio-z.wikispaces.com/ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~sony-vaio-z-series Post to: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://launchpad.net/~sony-vaio-z-series More help: https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
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