CrunchBang 11 "Waldorf" on VAIO P - VPCP115KG

An Aging Laptop
Released in June 2010 with an ATOM CPU Z540, VAIO P shows its age with Mate / Cinnamon desktop. At some point I planned to sell it out but after the announcement that Sony sold its VAIO division, I preferred to keep it and started looking for a lightweight, non Xfce Linux distro. Came across an article from LXF and then did a bit googling, I decided to give CrunchBang a try as it looks very promising with a simple desktop and a dark theme, a bit look like the old days of Linux Mint 5.

Installation
Download the 32-bit Waldorf for Modern PCs torrent and transfer the iso to a USB flash drive using USB image writer. The installation is straight forward and VAIO P displays everything correctly. The only problem I got was the LVM partitioning and poked around the menu for quite a while. In general the installation should finish everything in 10 minutes. Once CrunchBang starts, an interactive shell prompts and guides you through updates and packages installation.

Problem: Screen Flickers
The screen keeps flickering and the following errors are logged in /var/log/messages:
Apr 10 10:31:25 vpcp115kg kernel: [  187.040067] [drm] GMBUS timed out, falling back to bit banging on pin 0 [gma500 gmbus disabled]

The fix is to install latest kernel using smxi, the kernel I am using is:
root@vpcp115kg:~# uname -a
Linux vpcp115kg 3.12-10.dmz.1-liquorix-686 #1 ZEN SMP PREEMPT Fri Feb 7 04:09:24 UTC 2014 i686 GNU/Linux
 
Problem: Audio playing too fast
When playing flac using VLC player or Audacious, the audio playing is too fast. This problem emerges from the liquorix kernels. With the default kernel Linux 3.2.0-4-686-pae the playback of audio is fine.

The fix is to append the following line to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf
options snd-hda-intel position_fix=1

Reboot and then run the following commands:
rm -rf ~/.pulse*
pulseaudio -k

< 30 seconds
From power up to Openbox login prompt it takes about 27.4 seconds from my stopwatch!