Member Avatar for veledrom

Hi guys,

I am thinking to buy Sony VAIO S Series VPC-S12L9E/B but I have an important question. Do you think SONY is Linux compatible? Or if you have any other suggestions?

Thanks

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by khakilang

Dani AI

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The short answer is: it often depends on the exact components inside that VAIO, not the Sony badge. As asked and as , and noted, many VAIOs run Linux fine, but a few chips (wireless, graphics, touchpad, power-management) can need extra work. Below is a concise pre-purchase checklist and quick tests to verify real compatibility.

Before you buy: get the full spec sheet (exact wireless chip, GPU, SATA controller, touchpad vendor, webcam). Search a hardware report site for that model and component entries, and check which kernel series first added support. Prepare a bootable live USB so you can test before installing. Useful resources: linux-hardware.org, and the Linux kernel site at kernel.org. Use a reliable image-flasher like balenaEtcher to create your live media.

Quick workflow to test a live image (boot the USB, open a terminal):

lspci -nnk
lsusb
sudo lshw -short
dmesg | grep -i firmware

lspci/lsusb show devices and vendor IDs; lshw summarizes classes (network/display); dmesg reveals firmware or driver errors. Check Wi‑Fi, video acceleration, suspend/resume, brightness keys, sound, webcam and trackpad. If something is missing, dmesg and lspci -nnk give the exact chip names to search for driver instructions.

Final tips: if the laptop uses UEFI/Secure Boot, be prepared to toggle settings. Set SATA to AHCI if possible. Some devices require proprietary firmware or newer kernels—either install that firmware package or use a newer kernel/backport. For practical laptop-testing and troubleshooting steps see the ArchWiki laptop page: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop.

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Member Avatar for rch1231

Hello,

I would be willing to bet it is depending on the distribution you choose. Try Fedora Core. It is retty good with laptops.

Member Avatar for Stefano Mtangoo

Can it run windows? If yes, Linux can.
And Ubuntu is my recommendation

Member Avatar for khakilang

Depend whether the Linux you install has the latest Kernel. It should not be a problem with Fedora 13, OpenSuse 11.3 and Ubuntu 10.04 (Ubuntu 10.10 will be release on October 2010) if you want to try.

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