Gutsy fails to work properly on Sony Vaio PCG-SRX51P/B

[Russel Winder]

I have just tried to install Gutsy from the standard Live CD on a Sony Vaio OCG-SRX51P/B. The Live CD fails to boot into a sensible state -- blank screen. I tried the "safe mode" and it did boot to a usable state (though the screen is 640x480 so most of the controls are not visible since the windows are bigger than the screen. This allowed me to install gutsy -- though I had to guess a lot of the keystrokes because the buttons and controls were no on screen.

The result was a bootable version of Gutsy but there appeared to be no way to get 1024x768 behaviour, it would only ever work in 800x600 mode. Trying to change the driver (to i810) cause chaos, black screens and all sorts. I tried manually tinkering with /etc/X11/xorg.conf but nothing seemed to work and booting always came up using xorg.conf.failsafe in the VESA 800x600 mode.

I have just reinstalled Feisty from its LiveCD disk and it got everything right first time with no tinkering.

[Russel Winder (russel)]

Is this the same problem as Bug #141646 ?

[Russel Winder (russel)]

Just to note that I retried the upgrade from Feisty -> Gutsy yesterday and this time it worked fine. I have no idea what the difference is between now and then, but the machine is now happily running Gutsy. I guess this means this bug report should be closed, Gutsy actually works even though the Live CD did not.

There is a problem with the Hardy Heron alpha 3 Live CD though, but that is Bug #183746.

[Russel Winder (russel)]

I have now upgraded this machien to Hardy which appears to be working fine -- I haven't actually tried the Live CD, I just upgraded and everything worked as required. I wonder if time has passed this bug by and it should be quietly dropped.