I was planning to skip Karmic Koala. Jaunty was running just fine but since I replaced my notebook I had an opportunity to try it.
I bought another Sony Vaio but this time without a stupid keyboard. I opted for the VPCCW model because it offered an NVIDIA (GEFORCE 230M) graphics card. I was interested in the SR series but because of my bad experience in the past I didn’t want to deal with ATI.
And that is the irony. Installed Karmic and even wireless worked out of the box. Surprise! After enabling NVIDIA proprietary drivers (190.42) and rebooting my screen was black. Frustration.
After some time googling and reading NVIDIA documents I found out that I had to set xorg.conf to use a custom EDID.
Option "ConnectedMonitor" "DFP-0"
Option "CustomEDID" "DFP-0:/path/to/bin/edid/SNY05FA.bin"
Everything is running smoothly now but I can’t stop thinking that this kind of problem is what makes linux desktop adoption harder. It’s just a matter of time though.