Fedora 10 running on my Sony Vaio-P

I picked up a Sony Vaio P-Series “Lifestyle PC” (er, netbook) a little while ago, and thought I’d try installing Linux on it. The standard Ubuntu 8.10 distro didn’t want to install. Then I tried Fedora. Also no luck. I began to lose hope.

Then I came across AdamW’s blog, where he described in general terms how he was able to do a network install of Fedora 10 on his Vaio-P. Determined to make it work, I followed in his footsteps and documented the process. The result? Fedora 10 running quite nicely on my Vaio-P. A lot of the onboard hardware just works out of the box (with the exception of the graphics chipset, which requires some tweaking).

Actually, I’m really quite surprised: ethernet, wireless, audio, bluetooth, webcam, cpu scaling, and power management (including suspend/resume!) just plain works.

Now if someone will only get around to fixing up the Intel GMA500/Poulson X drivers.

Update: Ubuntu 9.04 went on without any difficulty (and I also got 8.10 working – not sure why it gave me trouble the first time around). VESA video is working at the Vaio’s native resolution. Still no word on GMA500/Poulson native drivers yet. But overall, the Vaio-P makes a good little Linux netbook.

I thought I’d put together a video describing the process. The low resolution might make it a bit hard to read some of the screen text, but I tried to explain each step verbally along the way.

HowTo: Combine PDF files into a single document in OS X from Mike K. on Vimeo.