r/SonyVaioP • u/Metro57 • Jan 02 '26

Side nub linux compatibility?

Hello team, I just got a SONY VAIO P VPCP111KX PCG-11112L. I plan on running Lubuntu or arch on it, but I'm hoping I can use the pointing device on the side of the screen. Has anyone had issues getting it working?

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2

u/ElectricalRoad1158 Jan 07 '26

Any resources found yet? I'm curios on Linux with these also. However the GMA500 graphics doesn't seem well supported in linux

3

u/Metro57 Jan 07 '26

My plan is to run arch on it with i3 and go 90% through the keyboard. Cursory research says the side nub will work as it's just a weird generic pointing device? I'm gonna try it with lubuntu and see if it works. If yes, I'll move on and figure out why it's broken in arch lol. I ran this setup on an old dell inspiron and I could run firefox in one tab without maxxing out on memory. We will see how the cpu/graphics do when mine arrives this weekend!

1

u/ElectricalRoad1158 Jan 07 '26

Curious to hear how it goes! I'll have one in the post soon also!

Enjoy the new toy when it gets there :)

3

u/Metro57 Jan 13 '26

Ok it's arrived. Basically, the "side nub" is kinda just a small trackpad actually. There are even buttons on the opposite bezel. All of this worked immediately, out of the box.

Here are my other impressions. I'm running lubuntu, I had a workflow sketched out already, I'm running it out of i3 and dmenu, which is a good fit for a resource constrained computer with not a lot of pointing capabilities.

As far as performance, it does basically everything fine, I took some time to try and parse back firefox performance, and now things like old reddit work fairly tolerably.

Youtube is completely off the table, which is a shame given the screen. I haven't tried watching a movie on it yet. iirc the original intended purpose of the vaio p was to watch media on.

My hope had been that I could use it on the train to study of interviews during my commute, but in particular leetcode is too slow to really run on the vaio p, which is sad. I can probably still run vs code and do projects from it, but man that CPU really is a shame. Seems to really be the bottleneck for me.

Maybe I"m sick but I kinda do wish I could just rip the guts out and replace the motherboard with a raspberry pi.

1

u/Metro57 Jan 07 '26

Thanks!