Apparently, to get all the hardware on my Vaio P series to work properly, I need kernel verison 2.6.39 or thereabouts, and it seems Mint 9 supports the required tweaking.

Am I missing out if I use older kernel and/or distributions? I’m happy with Mint generally, I liked it (with Xfce) much better than Ubuntu 12 with whatever that comes with.

What hardware doesn’t work?

EDIT:

Looking at this link here, Ubuntu 12.10 works?

EDIT2:

And if you don’t like Unity (The desktop that ubuntu ships with), you can just install XFCE and use that instead.

Using older kernels will generally just affect your hardware usage and what software you can run on the system. There are also security concerns around that too so try and run the latest one possible for whichever flavour of distribution you’re using.

Phoronix was reporting on pretty bad power problems on later 2.6 kernels as well so you might not get the best battery life from it..

Ok so Mint 13 bascially worked, as did Ubuntu 12, but I had two issues.

1) 3G device only works if you boot into Windows first then reboot into Linux

2) No 2D or 3D acceleration

Both those things can be fixed, and people have published fixes, but only for older kernel versions.

If that’s one of the ones with a GMA 500 graphics chip, it’s crap even on the older kernels, just slightly less crap.

Where are the patches? Maybe they’ve changes since I last saw.

It is gma500 yes. I have a link to the guy who got 3d acceleration working and got 1000fps from glxgears instead of 100 as I got. Also I couldn’t play youtube vids.

not familiar with the latest ubuntu… do they still use an /etc/X11/xorg.conf ? if so take a look at that to see what your graphics setup is up to

you probably need FFmpeg codec to view youtube

I normally just go mental and install loads of codecs along with VLC

What a load of bollocks this is.

The older Mint with the older kernel was a mess. Graphics were unusably slow and I had trouble getting the suggested packages to compile and install. So I’ve gone back to 16 and it’s quite usable. The GMA500 driver that comes with Mint 16 is usable but without 2D acceleration video won’t play. Apparently someone IS working on it though. The onboard 3G still doesn’t work properly, but I guess I will have to put up with that now.

When booted something like 400MB of the 2GB RAM is in use, and the swap file is unused, which is nice 🙂

I think I might use what I’ve learned though and install Linux on my work machine. Mint + KVM as a hypervisor with nothing installed apart from a browser, and everything else in VMs.

Mint + KVM as a hypervisor with nothing installed apart from a browser, and everything else in VMs

That’s how a lot of the developers I work with work. Also means they can setup specific environments quickly and leave them like that without it affecting daily work.

IT policy states that if you use a VM both it and the host have to be standards compliant. Which would mean they BOTH have to have their disks encrypted 😯

Bolx to that. If the VPN client is on the guest then the host never needs to connect to work.. Of course the problem with that is that I can’t then distribute the VMs as to connect to work it all needs to be registered in my name.

What’s wrong with using Debian + XFCE/Gnome/KDE/etc

For which?

Have not installed Mint for years but just run a install of Fedora 19 for work and disk encryption (work policy) was super easy. Just next-next-finish!

As far as kernels go just run the latest one available for the distro you want. If that doesn’t work for you, and you need a bleeding edge kernel you can download and compile the latest without too much problems.

Lots of how to’s on the interweb or find another distro with the kernel support you need.

EDIT: Fedora 19 current kernel version is 3.12.5, if that is any good for you? 2.6.39 is rather old now.

Info on whats in and out of the latest release here: Kernel Changes

Changes are gernerally hardware support and features like memory, power, cpu and gpu management.

The problem for my Vaio is that people made patches for the old kernels, and did not update for the newer ones.