The following is what I did to get Ubuntu 10.04 x86(32-bit) running properly on a Sony VAIO VPCF121GX PCG-81114L. This laptop is currently sold at Costco but shares the same body with many other VPCF12***X models. Sony has an annoying way of putting two model numbers on their laptops. I had more luck once I used the one on the bottom (PCG) rather than the one on the screen bezel(VPC).<\/p>\n
I’m not sure if these instructions will work for other models but please comment if it works for you. When booting from a 10.04.1 livecd or a default install I wasn’t hearing any sound, couldn’t use the touchpad, could not resume from suspend. I’ve solved 2.5 of 3 problems so far(mic still doesn’t work).<\/p>\n
Sound<\/strong><\/p>\n To fix the sound not working, alsa needs to be updated via a backported package. This package is for my current kernel of 2.6.32-24 though you’ll want to make sure you get the corresponding version for your kernel.<\/p>\n sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-alsa-`uname -r`<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I wrote mostly above because the microphone still doesn’t work on the laptop. I’ve not tried any external mics or usb headsets yet but will update this article if I do find a solution.<\/p>\n Touchpad<\/strong><\/p>\n This laptop uses and Alps Synaptics touchpad which is fairly common so I don’t really understand why Ubuntu doesn’t support it. The problem appears to be with the auto-detection of the touchpad(lots of Macintosh messages show in the \/var\/log\/Xorg.0.log). To get the touchpad working:<\/p>\n 1. Run: sudo vi \/etc\/default\/grub and modify it so the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX line looks like this: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=”i8042.nopnp” Suspend<\/strong><\/p>\n I wasn’t able to resume from suspend until I loaded the latest Nvidia driver. This laptop has an Nvidia GeForce 310M and I found the driver on a forum post. I still cannot switch to other consoles with Ctrl-Alt-F[1-6] so hopefully a future version of their driver will fix that. You can get the driver via ftp from:<\/p>\n ftp:\/\/download.nvidia.com\/XFree86\/Linux-x86\/256.44\/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-256.44.run<\/p>\n This is a shell script(a 24mb one at that) so you’ll need to open a terminal and cd to wherever you save it and then:<\/p>\n chmod a+x NVIDIA-Linux-x86-256.44.run<\/p><\/blockquote>\n At this point you need to switch to root at runlevel 3. As root at the console I did this by typing:<\/p>\n init 3<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Then I was able to login, sudo su to root again and run the driver installation script with:<\/p>\n .\/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-256.44.run<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Now my suspend works!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The following is what I did to get Ubuntu 10.04 x86(32-bit) running properly on a Sony VAIO VPCF121GX PCG-81114L. This laptop is currently sold at Costco but shares the same body with many other VPCF12***X models. Sony has an annoying way of putting two model numbers on their laptops. I had more luck once I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[27,43,12],"class_list":["post-367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-default","tag-gnulinux","tag-howto","tag-ubuntu"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidsterry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidsterry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidsterry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidsterry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidsterry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=367"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/davidsterry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":369,"href":"https:\/\/davidsterry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367\/revisions\/369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidsterry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidsterry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidsterry.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n2. Run: sudo update-grub
\n3. Reboot.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n