Sony Vaio VPCSB Installation failures

[chickpea]

Ok, so I picked up a brand new sony vaio VPCSB over the weekend. I tried installing Sabayon 6 amd64 kde, but it freezes about at the time that it should be switching to pty7 following kdm startup, but all I get is a blank background and a frozen cursor. I cannot CTR-ALT-F1 to drop to a terminal and get logs and see what the eff is going on.

As a basis this computer has a core i5 second gen with hybrid graphics (switchable between the intel graphics of the i5 and a radeon hd 6600M.

I also see another headache coming down the pipe as it appears that the mouse is also not recognized during udev processing (as it throws an error).

Before you ask, yes I checked the md5sum of the burn.


I did try use unetbootin to get a USB live of Sabayon 5.5 spinbase, and that boots fine to the console, but that's x86 (IIRC) and I didn't want to install that, I wanted x86-64.

So today in trying to solve this, I came across this post in ubuntu forums http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1744188. Which details others who list problems with the hybrid graphics card of the Sony Vaio VPCSB and the solutions they have created (relies on some rc scripts). I have no issue with implementing these fixes, but I can't even get to a terminal to install. Perhaps I'll try text based install and then getting GUI up and running later. Just needed a little guidance on troubleshooting this issue and also provide this link to the devs and community as I imagine these systems are becoming more common and more people will run into these same problems, so this information could be useful in the GUI configurator.

Cheers. Any wisdom is really appreciated.

[chickpea]

seems like this is the same issue as is occurring in this bug report http://bugs.sabayon.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2210.

Not sure, but it seems this is still an issue.

[chickpea]

So Linux Mint works great out of the box, doesn't seem to load both video modules however, currently (on live cd) it is only using the i915 intel drivers, although it did prompt me to download fglrx.

So now I'm in a linux environment I'll post some information on this machine to help the cause.

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mint@mint ~ $ lsmod
Module                  Size  Used by
binfmt_misc             6599  1
parport_pc             26058  0
ppdev                   5556  0
dm_crypt               11385  0
lp                      7342  0
parport                31492  3 parport_pc,ppdev,lp
snd_hda_codec_intelhdmi     9812  1
snd_hda_codec_realtek   217980  1
snd_hda_intel          22107  2
rfcomm                 33811  4
snd_hda_codec          87552  3 snd_hda_codec_intelhdmi,snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel
snd_hwdep               5040  1 snd_hda_codec
snd_pcm                71475  2 snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec
sco                     7998  2
snd_seq_midi            4588  0
snd_rawmidi            17783  1 snd_seq_midi
arc4                    1165  2
snd_seq_midi_event      6047  1 snd_seq_midi
bnep                    9542  2
snd_seq                47174  2 snd_seq_midi,snd_seq_midi_event
l2cap                  37008  16 rfcomm,bnep
iwlagn                178948  0
snd_timer              19067  2 snd_pcm,snd_seq
snd_seq_device          5744  3 snd_seq_midi,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq
iwlcore               127415  1 iwlagn
sony_laptop            29088  0
uvcvideo               55847  0
mac80211              231541  2 iwlagn,iwlcore
videodev               43098  1 uvcvideo
btusb                  10969  2
cfg80211              144470  3 iwlagn,iwlcore,mac80211
v4l1_compat            13359  2 uvcvideo,videodev
snd                    49006  13 snd_hda_codec_realtek,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_hwdep,snd_pcm,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq,snd_timer,snd_seq_device
bluetooth              50500  9 rfcomm,sco,bnep,l2cap,btusb
soundcore                880  1 snd
xhci_hcd               51737  0
snd_page_alloc          7120  2 snd_hda_intel,snd_pcm
psmouse                59033  0
serio_raw               4022  0
squashfs               25209  1
aufs                  152358  3700
nls_iso8859_1           3261  1
nls_cp437               4931  1
vfat                    9201  1
fat                    48240  1 vfat
dm_raid45              81721  0
xor                    15136  1 dm_raid45
btrfs                 489451  0
zlib_deflate           19266  1 btrfs
crc32c                  2531  1
libcrc32c                887  1 btrfs
i915                  290938  2
drm_kms_helper         30200  1 i915
usb_storage            40172  1
drm                   168054  3 i915,drm_kms_helper
i2c_algo_bit            5168  1 i915
ahci                   19013  0
libahci                21667  1 ahci
r8169                  36489  0
mii                     4425  1 r8169
video                  18712  1 i915
intel_agp              26360  2 i915
output                  1883  1 video
agpgart                32011  2 drm,intel_agp

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mint@mint ~ $ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Sandy Bridge DRAM Controller (rev 09)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Sandy Bridge PCI Express Root Port (rev 09)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Sandy Bridge Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation Cougar Point HECI Controller #1 (rev 04)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation Cougar Point USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 (rev 04)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Cougar Point High Definition Audio Controller (rev 04)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cougar Point PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev b4)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cougar Point PCI Express Root Port 2 (rev b4)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cougar Point PCI Express Root Port 3 (rev b4)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Cougar Point PCI Express Root Port 4 (rev b4)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation Cougar Point USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 (rev 04)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Cougar Point LPC Controller (rev 04)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation Cougar Point 6 port SATA AHCI Controller (rev 04)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation Cougar Point SMBus Controller (rev 04)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc Device 6760
02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Centrino Wireless-N 1000
03:00.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. Device 5209 (rev 01)
04:00.0 USB Controller: NEC Corporation uPD720200 USB 3.0 Host Controller (rev 04)
05:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 06)


Hmm, sorry don't know where Mint keeps xorg.conf file (I ran locate, but came up with some output I am not familiar with. Looks like xserver is handled a little differently in Ubuntu/Mint.

Perhaps for now, I can get sabayon to work with simply the i915 drivers and wait for the vgaswitcheroo patch to be set up in the coming kernel updates.