Sony P-Series

(specifically: win7 era P788K, 8" 1600x768 display, 2B RAM, GMA 500 graphics, 64GB SSD)

I got this supercute mini-laptop last year I had been using Ubuntu linux Lucid (10.4) and just upped to Meerkat (10.10). (Both were Netbook Edition).

I’d never gotten video acceleration to work before and was stuck w/ ~1-5 fps video most of the time. Doing the widely suggested:

set -e
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gma500/ppa
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gma500/fix
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install poulsbo-driver-2d poulsbo-driver-3d poulsbo-config

… bricked my vaio 8-( well, i mean, it gave me root login w/o X/windows ability but… 8-p)

but 2-3 apt-get remove, reinstalls, hunting google later, found the apparent saviour (I did 1000mb from 2000mb recommended here):

sudo nano /etc/default/grub
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash mem=1000mb acpi_osi=Linux"
sudo update-grub

booted clean! immediately got ability to use proprietary vaio accessory to output VGA to external monitor (a first!) and brightness up/down hotkeys working. (brightness to work even at all!)

but best of all, video and appearance and everything (moving windows, starting applications) was so much faster visually!

cmd-line video playback with

sudo apt-get remove mplayer
sudo apt-get install gnome-mplayer gecko-mediaplayer

so this is all i have done, aside from starting w/ vanilla install (with just a few changes to help w/ SSD instead of HD) of lucid upgraded to meerkat.

(personally, i’m still working on getting suspend/resume to work (seems to work but the display doesn’t come back on – been like this the whole time) and to get hibernate to work – prolly will go with some kinda memory stick to dump to)

UPDATE!

suspend/resume working now with change to suggested “gma500 fix”

set -e
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gma500/ppa
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gma500/fix
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install poulsbo-driver-2d poulsbo-driver-3d poulsbo-config

I think this additional suggestion may have fixed sleep/resume (but it’s possible it was just the gma500/fix related packages in live above:

sudo mv /usr/lib/pm-utils/sleep.d/99video /usr/lib/pm-utils/99video