mn :: comp :: hardware

Linux on the Hewlett Packard Omnibook 900

I got an HP Omnibook 900 in June of 2000 to replace my stolen (may the bastard who took it rot in hell) Sony VAIO 505RS . I chose the HP because:

1. Due to their moronic product marketing, Sony wasn't selling the 505HS (the 505RS's replacement) anymore. This was supposedly to build demand for the 505HS's replacement, the 505VS -- which wouldn't be available for another three weeks. What it actually did was prevent me from buying another Sony.
2. The big vendors offering preinstalled Linux laptops (IBM and Dell) were only doing it for full-size 8 pound desktop replacements, two or three quarters from that time. My experiences with Dell and IBM in the past were also not so great.
3. My company, Rainfinity, was trying to standardize on HP and Dell laptops. The Dells were nice for fullsize laptops but they had no thin offering. HP had a nice line of thin, medium, and full size laptops. What I really wanted was another Sony, but I settled on the Omnibook 900. It was right down the middle of HP's lineup in terms of performance, features, size, and price. It's thicker and heavier than the VAIO line, but still reasonable to carry around.

Specifications

• Pentium III 500MHz
• 128 MB RAM
• ATI Rage Mobility/P with 4mb RAM
• Xircom Ethernet/modem card
• Optional external drive bay, with CDROM and floppy hot-swappables
• Mandrake 7.1
• VMWare and Windows98

Installation

Disk /dev/hda: 240 heads, 63 sectors, 1559 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 15120 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *         1        46    347728+  a0  IBM Thinkpad hibernation
/dev/hda2            47      1559  11438280    5  Extended
/dev/hda5            47        47      7528+  83  Linux
/dev/hda6           334       366    249448+  82  Linux swap
/dev/hda7            48       333   2162128+  83  Linux
/dev/hda8           367      1559   9019048+  83  Linux

[jack@chupacabra jack]$ cat /etc/fstab
/dev/hda7 / ext2 noatime 1 1
/dev/hda5 /boot ext2 noatime 1 2
none /dev/pts devpts mode=0620 0 0
/dev/hda8 /home reiserfs noatime 1 2
/dev/fd0	/mnt/floppy	auto	defaults,noauto,user	0 0
/dev/hdc	/mnt/cdrom	iso9660 defaults,ro,noauto,user,exec	0 0
none /proc proc defaults 0 0
/dev/hda6 swap swap defaults 0 0

Don't forget to leave /dev/hda1 alone or else suspend-to-disk will quit working :-( The hotswappable CDROM and floppy drive work nicely, with nothing extra required. I didn't try supermount, so good luck if you want to do that.

Next, I selected my packages and installed them. My Xircom PCMCIA card was picked up and configured with no problem. Video probing didn't detect the video chip correctly, so I tried selecting ATI Mobility/P. That gave me goofy sync problems so I tried ATI Rage 128 and got 1024x768x16bpp without a sweat. I'm using the LCD Panel 1024x768 monitor definition.

APM suspends froze the machine at first, so I poked around in /etc/sysconfig/ and found the problem. BTW, Mandrake changed their apm script so that everything is done with one script. The options with which that script is called are stored in /etc/sysconfig/apmd. Here's mine:

APMSCRIPTS=/etc/sysconfig/apm-scripts

# make an entry in the logfiles whenever the percentage of
# battery power changes below the value specified here
LOGPERCENTCHANGE=10

# warn on specified remainig battery percentage
WARNPERCENT=5

# use -W to warn all users in a critical power state
ADDPARAMS="-W"

# use -s for command execution before entering the suspend state
PRESUSPENDCMD="-s $APMSCRIPTS/suspend"

# use -r for command execution after resuming from a suspend state
POSTRESUMECMD="-r $APMSCRIPTS/resume"

# use -l for command execution on low battery
LOWBATCMD=""

# use -a for command execution on switching to ac power
ACONCMD=""

# use -b for command execution on switching to battery power
ACOFFCMD=""

# if you have problems with your X display after returning from suspend mode
# give CHANGEVT the number of the virtual terminal your X-Server runs on
CHANGEVT="7"

# If you set this to yes, the clock will be synced with the hardware clock
# when the computer returns from suspend mode.
CLOCK_SYNC="yes"

# Some broken harddisks, like those found in Gericom 3xC notebooks,
# won't wake up from suspend to disk unless they're set to PIO mode and
# 16-bit.
# Don't activate the following two lines unless you're getting
# "hda: lost interrupt" after returning from a suspend to disk.
#HDPARM_AT_SUSPEND="-q -X0 -q -c0 -q -d0 -q -u0 -q -S0"
#HDPARM_AT_RESUME="-q -X66 -q -c1 -q -d1 -q -u1 -q -S30"

# the error-beep of your terminal might be set to the default values after a
# resume so set TERMINALBEEP to "yes" to restore the values in
# /etc/sysconfig/keyboard
TERMINALBEEP="no"

# if your sound sometimes doesn't work after a resume set RESTORESOUND to "yes";# this will kill all sound applications, remove and start the $SOUNDMODULES
# again, and, if you also set $RESTORESOUNDPROGS to "yes", restart the
# sound applications as the correct user and on the correct display
RESTORESOUND="no"
RESTORESOUNDPROGS="no"
SOUNDMODULES="sb uart401 sound soundcore"

# I got frequent problems mainly with scsi-pcmcia-cards on the cardbus. Use
# PCMCIARESTART="yes" to stop the whole pcmcia-subsystem on a suspend and
# to start it again after a resume. This can slow down your suspend and resume
# process. Use PCMCIAWAIT to wait with the suspend until the pccard is removed
# from the system.
PCMCIARESTART="yes"
PCMCIAWAIT="no"

I haven't tried USB, but Mandrake 7.1's kernel has the USB patches and I know people who are using it with laptops to run mice and keyboards. The only thing I've tried which doesn't work yet is Quake 2, and that's probably just a Glide problem :-). For Linux users, this laptop is a 9 out of 10 -- it loses points because the keyboard is a little unresponsive and because it's ugly. I would buy another one.

Last modified: Nov 25, 2005 12:48 pm. Contact me.