Sony Vaio and Linux
 

Hi:
I have a Intel i5 dual core processor,64 bit, turbo boost;1 GB AMD Radeon graphic's card; 500 GB HDD and 6 GB of Ram on this Vaio.

Sony put Windows 7 Home premium on the C drive.
Anyway; I've been accustomed to Ubuntu 10.04 and Debian Squeeze for the last 3 years. I'm not comfortable with this OS.

I'm thinking that I should wait the 30 days to put Linux on this however; I'm also thinking what good is this Vaio to me when I have to keep going and getting my roomate for help because she knows windows better than I.

What distribution of Linux can this Vaio accept?

If it was your laptop what would you do?

I'd sell it and buy something better (and not from $ony).

It should work with any Linux distro, but I don't now how well. Why not try a live CD and see what works and what doesn't. Or make some space on the partition (defragment), shrink the partition, make a new partition and dual boot.

I disagree with H_Texmex_h (sorry). I've used Vaio's for years, and have had great luck with them. Ubuntu should be fine, but it's all a matter of personal preference. I'm currently using openSUSE 11.4, and EVERYTHING on my VPCF1 is working fine. Had to tweak a few things, but I've tried to document most of it on this site, under the General forum->Member success stories. I'm going to go to openSUSE 12.1 soon...just been busy. If you already know/like Ubuntu, there should be no reason for you to go with something else, though. But the Unity interface has had LOTS of negative reviews.

Agreed. Vaio used to work very well with Linux, but Sony has not been the best of firms. Might check to see if it has an EFI BIOS. If so you'll have a few hoops to jump through to boot linux on it.

I appreciate all the feedback from all of you; Thanks for writing-

By the sound of what some of you have mentioned I might just return the laptop to Sony-
I don't want problems for the future.

Got some serious thinking to do. I have a small data base now that will help me to decide.

Sharing honestly helps; Thanks

I read about the case between sony and the federal trade commission.

I'm not sure that I want to jump through hoops to get Linux on it. Don't really want any headaches-
I might just return it-
Thanks

My wife has a 3 year old VAIO (dont know the model off hand) running Fedora17 just fine, without issues. At least it came with an Intel wifi card which work out of the box with Linux - unlike the Broadcom plague that seems to be on most others. If you like Ubuntu, just go for it now that it is new and you don't yet have too much personal data that you don't want to lose. Worst case, just reload Winblows with the recovery CD.

It sounds solid enough. Give win 7 60 or 80 Megs in case you want/need a m$ system (I find I use one a couple of times in a year), and install the distro of your choice, and configure it carefully and lovingly. I promoted myself to slackware, and haven't looked back. Less maintainance, I find.

Thanks for sharing-
Anyway this laptop wasn't cheap; I paid close to Eight hundred and it's very nice.
Just a little discouraged because it requires 5 DVD+r's for the recovery. So;I just have to purchase additional
DVD+R's.

I had Ubuntu for 2 years and really liked it. Now I'm enjoying Debian Squeeze on my Desktop Pc.

What would the level of ease/difficulty be to put Fedora on this Sony Vaio?

I managed to install Debian; what do you think?

I think it's solid as well-

Not sure how to give Win 60 or 80 Megs but I think during the install of the distro I wanna put on this Vaio I'll have the
opportunity to shrink Win and if not I should be able to dedicate 20 GB for the distro / and 1 GB for a swap-

Advice taken; to install carefully-

The tools are ntfsresize, and gparted(I think).

ntfsresize resizes the ntfs partition. then you can cut disk space. I gave vista 35G and I'm always battling for the last bit of space there. I have a kid who boots it when he visits and it seems to update itself now, much to my annoyance.

Got it: I'll resize the ntfs partition.

I'm not in favor of the Vista nor Win 7 upadates either.
Agreed; can be annoying-

Thanks

zQUEz:

You mentioned your wife's Vaio is about three years old.

Mine is the SVE15xxxx Enhanced E series; Would that make any difference?

make any difference to what?
To whether you should try and install the Linux OS that you want to use? no. I'm not an expert on VAIO's, but I have pulled apart a few of them and there is nothing unique about them from any other laptop.
As mentioned earlier, just boot from a live CD or USB drive and see what works and what doesn't.

Very easy. Understand that Fedora has the latest/greatest of packages and as such is considered a "testing" platform. I find it stable enough for my daily uses, but features do come and go as things get worked out. If you are not in support, I would stay with more tested distro's like Ubuntu.

If that works for you then roll with it. I use Red Hat based distros because supporting RHEL servers is part of my job, so I like to keep close to what they are doing. Plenty of Debian folks out there and at the end of the day, aside from syntax differences, they all work basically the same under-the-covers.

While it will work with those tools (GParted is by the way able to make use of ntfsresize, you don't have to invoke it manually) I personally prefer to use the Windows partition manager to shrink the Windows partition.