So I own a Sony Vaio VGN-S460P and am in no way particularly sufficient at the computer, let alone Linux (thus why this page did little to help me). But with the amount of difficulty I had obtaining information about my laptop and it’s compatability with Linux I figured I’d post about my experiences.
why I went for gOS:
I got this laptop as a hand-me-down from a company loaded with Windows XP. And it was frustrating. The computer ran very slow when opening programs and took nearly 5 minutes to boot up. Worse, I couldn’t get it to connect to the internet, wired or wireless. Every so often the wireless would work, but at speeds comparable to 56k for a maximum length of 10 minutes. I figured it may have been due to some kind of software loaded on the computer to prevent malware but I could never find any such software to disable. I finally figured I would just upload Linux and hope for the best.
After some research I couldn’t find any sort of definitive advice for which version of Linux I should use. I finally settled on gOS for the fact that it was a lightweight version of Ubuntu (which I’ve used before) and I wasn’t absolutely sure that it was a software and not a hardware problem that caused the slow running of this computer.
version 1.0.1
With the loading of version 1.0.1 I found my computer to be capable of connecting to the internet if I used an ethernet cable but it still had some trouble connecting wirelessly. Trying to setup the wireless connections was very frustrating as it would continually tell me seemingly conflicting information as to whether or not I had the correct password for my wireless network. I eventually gave up on trying to connect wirelessly and stuck to ethernet connections.
While connecting to the internet now worked, Firefox had a tendency to freeze up if I was running either an online video game or if I was watching an embedded video and tried to close the window.
And for some reason I could not control the volume of the speaker. It was just stuck on one setting and refused to change. Come to think of it, the only setting I could change using the Fn key was the screen brightness, and that was only to dim the screen. Once dimmed, I could not get it to turn back up…..
The only other technical problem I really had was that files I saved to the desktop would just not show up. I could still find the file by going through the file browser but when I tried to access the file it would report a fatal error saying “This isn’t suppose to happen”, reset the screen, and the file would show up on the desktop with all the other files rearranged and be fully accessible. Weird.
version gOS 2-beta (gOS Rocket E)
I couldn’t get this version to run off the live CD. Best I could find was that it had to do with the incompatibility of the Vaio’s bios with this version. Skip it. Rocket E is missing several essential functions (detailed here) that are part of Rocket G.
version gOS V2 Rocket (gOS Rocket G)
This is the current version that I’m running and thus far I’m decently happy with it though there are still problems that I’m having:
- The “Avant Window Navigator” does not show up. I have no idea as to why this would be. I haven’t done any of the updates yet and perhaps that will help….. This doesn’t create any real problems as I can still access programs through the gOS button at the top left of the screen, and any windows that I’ve minimized I can still get to by using alt-tab.
- Firefox still has a problem with embedded games or videos and me closing them. I’d say about 20% of the time when I try to close a window with an embedded video or game Firefox will freeze. I just have to force quit and reload Firefox and it works fine again.
- While trying to install programs I am occasionally confronted with one of two error messages
or
I can understand the second error, but the first one I have no idea how to fix. I’ve tried doing what it says but the ’synaptic’ package manager gives me no help and I sometimes get the message even if I have no other program that is similar (as far as I can tell).
Other than that, gOS runs fine on my computer. If anyone has any suggestions on the problems I’ve been having, or any mistakes I’ve made in this post (very probably) let me know in the comments.
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