Installing Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope on a Sony Vaio
Installing Linux on laptops still isn’t as easy as it should be. I installed Ubuntu 9.04 (“Jaunty”) on a Sony Vaio today, only to find that
- WiFi — on an Atheros AR242x controller — was working, but very slowly. I got no more than 23-80kB/sec on a 12Mb/sec connection, and frequently got as little as 1 kB/sec.
- Video effects weren’t supported on the Intel GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (they were supported on Vista and Windows 7) because of a known bug.
I fixed the wifi by using the Windows driver for the Atheros AR242x with ndiswrapper as described here. (Although the page says Jaunty doesn’t have this problem, it did.)
The video effects were fixed by following this thread from UbuntuForums.
Looks like the year of Linux on the desktop/laptop is still a few years off.
8 June 2009 4:41 pm
June 9th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
[...] be. I installed Ubuntu 9.04 (”Jaunty”) on a Sony Vaio today, only to find that…. More here WiFi — on an Atheros AR242x controller — was working, but very slowly. I got no more than [...]
June 10th, 2009 at 9:23 am
Which VAIO are you using? I am using Ubuntu 9.04 on my VGN-SZ430N and almost everything works out-of-the-box.
The only unfunctional components are fingerprint sensor and brightness control.
June 10th, 2009 at 9:52 am
A VGN-NR32M/S. I don’t think I’ve gotten the brightness control to work either — but I can blame Sony for that, I guess. But shipping Jaunty with broken wireless *and* display drivers … not cool.
June 19th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
“Looks like the year of Linux on the desktop/laptop is still a few years off”
That looks like such an ignorant comment. Try installing Windows on a machine it’s not built for, without the drivers, without co-operation from hardware manufacturers. You’ve been so brainwashed by the Microsoft Kool Aid you can’t think straight.
June 20th, 2009 at 10:01 am
Stop hiding behind the “oh hardware manufacturers don’t cooperate” line.
The Atheros drivers are open source. So are the Intel display drivers. In the case of the display drivers, they even worked in Ubuntu 8.10. Canonical basically said, right, let’s ship even though we have a nasty regression that affects one of the most common display cards out there. You don’t see too many responsible software vendors do that.