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What is the HP Omnibook 800 ?
The HP Omnibook 800 is a sub-laptop running with an Intel Pentium 166MHz MMx CPU with 512Kb L2 cache. It has a 10.4 inch active matrix (TFT) colour LCD screen with a resolution of up to 800 x 600 at 65,536 colours. It is fitted with an accelerated 128-bit PCI controller with 1 Mb of Video RAM (NeoMagic. 2093). It weighs 1.77 kg, and comes equipped with the following connections:
Why install Linux ?
There are several good reasons as to why I wanted to install Linux on the Omnibook 800, these being as follows:
The Installation Hardware.
Installing Linux on a HP Omnibook 800, was extremely straightforward. The Omnibook 800 comes with a SCSI port as standard, so I connected the SCSI HP CD-ROM drive to the Omnibook 800 SCSI port, and put a Redhat Linux 5.2 CD in it. I also connected up the external 3.5 inch floppy drive. When the Linux installation started, it picked up the SCSI CD-ROM straight away - very impressive.
I chose Redhat Linux 5.2 because I had installed earlier versions of Redhat Linux previously on other hardware, so was happy using it again. Having said that, I came close to getting SuSE and Debian implementations of Linux - I'll probably get them at some point and install them on one of my development boxes, just out of interest.
Linux Installation Time.
The installation process took me about 30-45 minutes, but that was only because I chose a custom installation. The workstation and server installations would have taken considerably less time.
The Linux Installation Process.
The 4 Gb hard disk that came with the Omnibook 800 was already partitioned into 2 x 2Gb partitions, so I left Windows-95 on the first partition, and installed Linux on the second partition. The Redhat manual recommends approximately 120 Mb for a minimal install, approximately 450 Mb of disk space for a Linux Workstation installation, and approximately 1.65 Gb of disk space for a Linux Server installation, so the 2 Gb I had was going to be ample for a server installation.
There are very few salient features of my install, since it was so simple, the only features that stand out are :
At the end of the install, the laptop booted to Linux flawlessly. No problems at all.
The built-in Mouse.
The HP Omnibook 800 comes with a bizarre flip-out mouse. It takes a bit of getting used to, but works quite well on a flat surface. Sat on your lap, it's a bit of a pig to use it though.
When running the Linux installation process, the mouse should be configured as a PS/2 mouse. Following installation, I experienced no problems with the mouse. Mouse operations with X-windows on the Omnibook 800 are fine.
X-Windows.
Problem: I started up X-windows, but it was having none of it. This was a bit of a bore, since I really needed to take advantage of X-windows for some of my development work (such as web development).
Stopgap Solution: I ran Xconfigurator (which didn't crash the machine), and dropped the screen display to a 640 x 400 LCD display in what looked like 0.5 bit colour.
X-windows then started up without a hitch - problem was, the screen display at this resolution blew chunks.
Eventual Solution: I downloaded the Precision Insight XFree86.neomagic fix (available form both the Precision Insight and the Redhat web sites). The screen display looks far, far better, now X-windows is useable.
Peripherals.
So far, I have successfully tested the following peripherals with the HP Omnibook 800 running Redhat Linux 5.2:
Interfacing a Linux laptop to household appliances.
Well, it just had to be done. Using as parallel port for just printing just seemed a bit tame. So I started thinking of other devices which could be interfaced to a Linux box.
Questions for new converts to the cause
How do I mount external devices such as floppy disk drives and CD-ROMs ?
Use the mount command. e.g.
For floppy disk drives: mount /mnt/floppy
How do I copy files from a MS-DOS format floppy disk.
Use the mcopy command. There are a number of commands for accessing MS-DOS format floppy disks. To copy a file from the floppy disk to the directory you are currently in, type:
mcopy a:filename.extension .
To copy a file from the floppy disk to a specific directory, type:
mcopy a:filename.extension /directory
Other Linux HP800 Omnibook Websites
Linux Links
(c) 1999-2000 Richard Osborne,
London. |
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