Fedora 16 on Pimped Up Sony Vaio Y Series

This post is a brief report, that is to be updated over time, of my experiences of the Sony Vaio Y Series laptop, pimped up with a 64GB SSD, with Fedora 16 in the driving seat. The overal goal was to have a laptop that can be used as a highly portable software development environment.

I came across the Vaio Y Series in the aftermath of a botched laptop upgrade. It all started in an effort to enhance the battery life of the old chunky beast, without too much thought I  recently went out and bought a 64GB Kingston SSDNow V100, downloaded the freshly released Ubuntu 11.11 ISO and went to work. Sadly the laptop was in such a sad state that it didn’t work out, so I went out and bought a 32 bit Sony Vaio Y Series laptop (VPCYB35AG) which  had fairly decent reviews in terms of battery life, and I absolutely loved the size and 11.6 inch HD screen.

I started by backing up the Windows 7 Starter edition OS onto a 16GB flash drive, and then swapped drives, the reason for the backup to flash drive, in addition to the OS already on the 320GB drive that came with the laptop, was incase there wasn’t sufficient driver support for the Vaio and I had to use Windows 7. I wanted to avoid the latter since I don’t regard Windows as a suitable development environment for server-side development, which is what I specialize in. Kudos to Sony when it comes to their recovery process, I tested Windows 7 recovery on the SSD, just to be sure that it would work, and it was all effortless.

In any case, having tested the laptop without linux, I got round to creating a bootable Fedora 16 USB key and installed onto the SDD. The first attempt failed, I do not know why, so I just repeated the process. Second time round it worked just fine.

The first challenge was getting used to Gnome 3 and also inconsistent boot behaviour that may be related to the next generation InsydeH20 UEFI BIOS and GRUB2. On the inconsistent boot behaviour, that may have been caused by me leaving on the “boot from external device” option in InsydeH20, I am uncertain. With regards to Gnome 3, so far I’m just getting used to it, and I like it, in any case, I am not too concerned with such details right now, its driver support that I’m concerned with, I just want the laptop to work in terms of the basics. Overall, right now I’d say I’m enjoying the experience, and given that all I’ve done to date is to “yum update”, the existing driver support is sufficient to get to work. So I’m generally happy. I’ll update this post in a couple of weeks time, once the laptop has seen more use.

Update 28 Nov 2011

Installed the latest official ATI Catalyst driver (11.11), and Gnome 3 immediately reverted to “fallback mode”, which in terms of usability seems a fairly serious regression. Rather the vent online, contacted AMD via their web form for support, this is the request:

Hi there,

I have purchased a Sony Vaio VPCYB35AG with an AMD E-450 APU (by the way your web form only gives an option for the E-350) and installed Fedora 16 with comes with Gnome 3.

I then installed the Catalyst ATI driver (ati-driver-installer-11-11-x86.x86_64.run). Rather than improving matters, it made it worse and so I researched what might be going wrong.

In any case, as far as I can tell (please see http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=99), AMD is aware of a Graphical corruption issues pertaining to the gnome-shell, but has not done anything about it.

Please can you let me know whether AMD is attending to this issue. I am sure there are thousands of affected linux users.

Regards,
Nico

As a parting comment, I wish I could just pay Sony, or whoever else, to give me a glitch free system. In any case, lets see what AMD says.

Update 3 Dec 2011

Given that I had little confidence in getting a satisfactory response from AMD, I reloaded Windows 7 and have been using it for the last few days. I’m now back to 4.5 hours battery life, instead of the 2.5 on Fedora 16. So, this brings, sadly, an end to my attempt to get any linux distribution going on my Vaio.

I did receive the following response from AMD 2 Dec 2011, which does not inspire confidence, as it does not help me. I would have been willing to pay for a working driver.

We do not officially support GNOME3, since none of our supported distributions use it by default. Unbuntu 11.10 is the first one to ship with this product, but it does not use Gnome3 by default.

Our OpenGL team is currently aware of the issue, plans may be in place to support it later on but there is no official word as of yet.