2010-10-11

Ubuntu on a VAIO F12: Upgrading to Meerkat 10.10 Might Hose Nvidia, Fixes Audio

As a follow-up to my last post, anyone using an Nvidia graphics card with the Nvidia Linux drivers may want to hold-off on upgrading to Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat.  I jumped the gun, did zero research, and found myself stuck with screwed up Nvidia drivers and no graphical interface.  Unfortunately, this seems like a common issue right now.

Luckily, I had kept the Nvidia drivers in my Downloads directory, so I was able to remove the bad drivers and reinstall them. That means I'm using the same drivers, but they needed to be reconfigured.  The reinstall process fixed it with no hassle.  If you're caught without the drivers pre-downloaded then you might be looking at a more complicated or difficult fix.  You can also switch back to the vesa drivers before upgrading.

On a side note, upgrading fixed my audio issues.  When I finally booted up 10.10 with the graphical login I heard the startup sounds for the first time.  At least that was a nice surprise.

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6 comments:

Unknown said...

How is the noise on your F12?

I'm running Fedora 13 and there's a constant ebb & flow of sound (not from the fan), presumably coming from the cpu idle mode.

Looks like there's an intel_max_cstate boot flag available in Kernel 2.6.35 and up, might have to give Fedora 14 a try and see if that quiets down this lovely beast

Unknown said...

The noise is minimal when the F12 is just idling or displaying a browser. My biggest problem with Ubuntu on the F12 is the keyboard backlight is always on. It's a minor complaint, but a little irritating. Of course, now Nvidia drivers are hosed on 10.10, so I've had to back-off from Ubuntu for now until that's stable.

The F12 does get noisy when I play games or have a lot of background applications. Sometimes the idling fan noise is louder than I would like, too. I've learned to accept it because it's a pretty powerful machine in a little laptop body. It beats my desktop in a few areas and that box runs with 4 120mm fans and generates a lot of heat and noise.

Unknown said...

Agreed, Chris, powerful machine, no complaints at all other than the noise, which persists.

Sure, one can tune it out, but when you shutdown or go into standby, does the sound continue? Obviously not, but you may find yourself hearing it anyway as it has been running in the background of your mind, so to speak.

I'm waiting for Fedora 14 bugs to get worked out and then give the intel_max_cstate boot flag a try -- Ubuntu 10.10 users have reported that this "solves" the noise problem.

God I hope so, this machine would be top laptop on the planet without the noise issue (6.5 lbs, Quad Core extreme CPU, 8GB RAM? a lightweight near 17" screened beast!)

Lengau said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Lengau said...

Have either of you been able to get video out working? Neither my HDMI port nor my VGA port seem to work.

Anonymous said...

same thing happened to me and it pissed me off soo much that i dualboot with windows now especially since i need this computer running as it is my connection to the technology! not to mention the games.. lol