Hoary installation report on Sony VGN-S3XP

[Rasputin]

Hi there!

Finally I found somebody with similiar problems. And I thought I would
be wandering alone in the endless desert.

Some weeks ago I bought a Sony Vaio VGN-FS195VP and installed Fedora
Core 3 which detected the sound card correctly but din't get the
nvidiaGForce Go 6200 (with TurboCache) to start off. I then switched to
Ubuntu Hoary Prerelease and there I had the problem that it recognized
the graphic card quite well, but failed completely in getting the intel
high definition sound card to work! After hours of try-and-error I gave
up and now I hope that the Hoary Final Version will fix this problem.

I'm not sure if (but I think) the nvidia GeForce Go 6200 is responsible
for some heavy graphic distortions that appear sometimes during work
with an programm (mostely with the Firefox broser) that covers the
whole desktop with colorful snow all over. The only way out ther is to
log (and pray) our or reboot completely. But even after a reboot the
color resolution sometimes stays wrong and psychodelic. One problem is
also the text cursor which freezes disappears or replicates itself a
hundred times inside a text field (like this one) during writing with a
GNOME program (but not in a terminal). This could also be a graphic card
issue - but I'm not sure. 

Another thing is the damned PCMCIA. Ubuntu recognises the built-in card
correctly as an Texas Instruments PCI7420PCI7620 Dual Socket card Bus
and Smart Card Controller but crashed constantly during installation
(needed to start with hw-detect/start_pcmcia=false), during startup
(needed to delete all the startup entries in the /etc/rcX.d) and even
during updates (had to manually remove the update entry in the
dpkg-file). Here again I look forward to the Hoary Final.

So there are some of my first impressions. I will stay with Ubuntu
because until now it runs incredibly stable. So maybe the Final Release
will bring the cure for my limping vaio.  \\:D/


-- 
Rasputin