Enable LCD of Sony VAIO VPCS116FW on Ubuntu 10.10

Because SONY has modified BIOS for the Nvdia chip in VAIO, official Nvidia drivers can't drive built-in LCD correctly on Ubuntu 10.10. To make LCD usable, one need to:

1. Use the latest Nvidia graphic driver from X updates PPA (260.19.29/270.18 is tested).

2. Modify /etc/X11/xorg.conf to add the two lines to the "Device" section:

Option "ConnectedMonitor" "DFP-0"

Option "CustomEDID" "DFP-0: /proc/acpi/video/IGPU/LCD0/EDID"

With these two steps, LCD should work well. Additional external monitors can be added. Also, support of brightness control can be added. Following are my xorg.conf:

Reference:

http://code.google.com/p/vaio-f11-linux/wiki/NVIDIASetup

Install Updated Nvidia Driver on Ubuntu

Since Ubuntu updates binary drivers infrqeuently, one can update them from the X Updates PPA. Just use these commands:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/x-updates

$ sudo apt-get update

Then you can get stable release of X.org components, drivers from upstream. Please be aware that those packages are not supported by Ubuntu. Nextly, if you have installed the binary driver for an Nvidia card, you can just type:

$ sudo apt-get upgrade

to upgrade it. Otherwise you can use the "Additional Drivers" tool or just type:

$ sudo apt-get install nvidia-current

to install it. If CUDA/OpenCL headers are also needed, they can be installed by executing this command:

$ sudo apt-get install nvidia-current-dev

After installing all Nvidia packages, a GPGPU (OpenCL/CUDA) development environment is established successfully.

PS: You may need to manually delete some files/links from old version of drivers under the /usr/lib directory.

Reference:

https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat/+archive/x-updates

Enable DirectVobSub with WMP on WIN7

Reference to : http://www.codecguide.com/faq_subtitles.htm#item11

To make DirectShow works, you can use win7dsfiltertweaker to disable formats support of the Media Foundation Framework (E.g.: MP4). This is a workaround, actually.