Linux

Guys thinking of trying to put linux mint onto a sony ar51e machine, anybody hear put linux on a sony vaio
any information apreciated

 

Running Ubuntu Jaunty perfectly on my Vaio TT here

I found the Vaio was one of the more challenging laptops I have installed *nix onto, mainly because of the FN keys - however there are workarounds and there is a patch coming to the 2.6.30 kernel for the sony_laptop module which might be of interest to you

Although, Mint releases do lag behind mainstream Ubuntu so you might have to apply the patch manually (only if your Fn keys are not working that is )

Here is my other post about it:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=378489

 

Not enough to say so. The latest Ubuntu and Mint are both 2.6.28-based, with about the same amount of packages that's the latest version. Sure, as Mint is Ubuntu based, it will always have the potential to lag a little behind, but as the development is open, the Mint maintainers know what's coming at the same time as the regular Ubuntu distro wranglers, and can generally implement it almost immediately.
Some other Ubuntu based distros may lag behind quite a bit, but Mint is, if you forgive the pun, rather fresh.

That said, I wouldn't recommend either of them, because the whole premise of Ubuntu is to give users a Windows-like experience, and what's the point then in running Linux? Get something where you have to abandon the trust model, power user concept, click-to-raise and all other Windows habits, and you get, IMO, a much more rewarding experience. One where you can take advantage of the unique Unix features that these distros have more or less obliterated in their quest to be "for everyone".

My top picks for those who don't want to roll their own are Fedora and Sabayon. They're far more "unixy" than Ubuntu and Mint, while still not sacrificing being up-to-date.
Fedora 10 works pretty well on Sony laptops -- even the newer EFI-based ones, and Fedora 11 is just days away now.

 

Cool - I was under the impression that the current release of Mint was based on Intrepid, not Jaunty.

I could understand if you said the premise of CentOS or PCLinuxOS were to give the user a windows like experience, but Ubuntu? If by Windows -Like you mean 'user friendly' well how is that a bad thing? Especially if someone is new to *nix?

Its a good starting point with a lot of support out there, probably a bit friendlier than some of the usual *nix user responses of 'google is your friend' - something that really can put people off the whole *nix community, and is based on Debian which is a very tried and tested OS.

Sort of like when people suggest Gentoo or Slackware as a first distro to someone who doesnt really understand computers that well but is sick of Windows and wants to try out a user friendly version of *nix...

I tried Fedora 10 on my Vaio TT - nice, but had issues with wifi and of course the Fn keys. Same as openSUSE failed to acknowledge my Intel GPU - I say try a few different variants if people want to try *nix, there are a lot to choose from and you might be surprised and what works and what doesnt!

But at the end of the day you either want to play with the OS all the time or you want to use your laptop for other things as well, but prefer not to use windows - well use what you find the best one for you and your hardware - regardless of what anyone else thinks.

Me? I think everyone should be made to use Linux From Scratch at least once..hehe

 

Thanks for information guys will try a couple on the machine and see how I get on will let you know.