STANDARD DISCLAIMER: there is no guarantee that the information on this page is accurate, and your experience could be different from the information here. Please consider that I am not a Linux addict, and this information is here just to help other people, as many wonderful people helped us in getting up Linux on an OmniBook 5000C
About the HP OmniBook 5000
The external aspect of the OmniBook 5000 is pretty much like the OmniBook
4000's, but don't get mistaken: inside, everything is
different: PCI Bus, C&T 65545 video controller (instead of the WD inside the
4000, sigh, and this is the only source of problems since this chipset is not
yet fully supported, see here for more details) etc...
The HP OmniBook 5000 series seems to be a pretty good laptop. It has several features over standard laptops that made us choose the machine:
This page is taken from the experience on the OmniBook 5000C (of the entry-level subseries VL), so I cannot comment on the 800x600, but DONABEDIAN Vahagn made kindly available his experience on installling using the 2.0 kernel the support for the built-in SCSI controller available in the more expensive notebooks here in french.
Linux Installation
Any modern distribution of Linux should install fine, but for the reasons I will
comment upon in the PCMCIA section, network install with the Slackware 2.1.0 (an
old version) did not go through. For the same reasons, you should better get
a recent version, with PCI support. Beware: 1.3.61 is the version
running for us, while the 1.3.7x reportedly cause problems with PCMCIA, so if you
promise not to blame me if something goes wrong, get the 1.3.61 kernel
and here are the
1.3.61 kernel config files
that worked for us (including sound support), in a nice .tar.gz
file X Windows
, that you should untar in the root directory,
as it contains the files
Actually, getting the 1.3.61 kernel is somehow getting difficult, as more recent
versions (that I did not test with the machine) are available, so here is a
local copy of the sources in .tar.gz
archive, for your convenience.
X Windows
The bulk of this information is the same as for other notebooks featuring the
C&T 65545, and you can look here. The
chip used here is on a PCI bus, and it works on the LCD properly with
XFree86-3.1.2, (it could not be programmed at more than 28.3, so no high resolution
external display worked when I first did the install, but this is fixed now! Just
get a recent Xfree distribution).
Make sure your kernel has PS/2 mouse support to use the HP OmniBook 5000 trackball.
Sound
The HP OmniBook 5000 features a Miro-Crystal CS4232 chipset for sound, game, and
MIDI control (yes, there is a tiny connector just below the PCMCIA ports for
connecting a MIDI device), which is supported in the Linux distribution, but you
will need to recompile the kernel with this driver properly configured:
During the make config, say no to all questions except the following ones
Enjoy!
Power Management
The OmniBook 5000 offers a myriad of APM features: turning off the hard drive,
the LCD display, putting the entire system into suspend mode, saving information
to disk, etc. Each power management feature can be turned off and on
individually.
Power management for the hard drive and LCD don't interfere with linux at all. The screen turns itself off and on like you'd expect, the hard drive spins down as often as Linux will allow it to. The hard drive spins back up when it is needed.
Suspend has no problems either: with 8Mb RAM, it takes 7 seconds to go to hybernation, and just a couple of seconds to come back alive where you left it.
Nevertheless, in suspend mode, the unix clock looses time, so you should better add a line in your crontab file invoking clock -s every, say, 10 minutes. We get more than one hour and a half of battery life with one battery installed. That was hours recompiling kernels :-(
SCSI support
As said above, this page is taken from the experience on the OmniBook 5000C (of
the entry-level subseries VL), that does not have the SCSI controller, so I
cannot comment directly on this, but the good news is that it works, and DONABEDIAN Vahagn made kindly available
his experience on installling using the 2.0 kernel the support for the built-in
SCSI controller available in the more expensive notebooks here in french.
Linux identifies two 16550A UART, one which is a true serial port, working perfectly well with PPP, the other connected (as the BIOS says) to the infrared communication unit. Again, any documentation/information on how to use this device will be much appreciated.
Docking Stations
No docking station yet, sorry.
Other Network Resources
This page has benefited from the experiences of: