Installing Linux on an HP Omnibook 4150

In the Box

The Omnibook 4150 has two bays. One bay is for the battery. The other one can be used for a floppy, CDROM, DVD, ZIP, a second battery,... So, it provides all the flexibility you can expect from a modern notebook computer.

The whole thing comes bundled with Microsoft Windows and a Microsoft Windows Recovery CDROM. The Recovery CD has some specialities see below.

Installing Linux

I booted RedHat 6.0 directly from CDROM and removed the Windows partition but left the hibernate partition in place. Repartitioned for linux and left 1Gig free for Windows. The whole installation went smoothly except when RedHat tried to detect the pointing device. The machine hang. I retried the whole procedure (without changing anything) and this time it worked.

When configuring X windows, you should select the Neomagic chip and LCD Panel 1024x768 as provided in the configuration menus. Otherwise, it is likely that X will not work.

In case you are using a different linux distribution where things do not run that smoothly, you might want to download my XF86Config file.

Pointing Device

As mentioned before, the computer has both an IBM trackpoint (with press-to-select feature) and a touchpad as pointing device. However, under X only standard functionality works. The trackpoint, the touchpad and the buttons. None of the other features.

Since the notebook has four mouse buttons (two for the trackpoint and two for the touchpad), I am wondering whether the left and right buttons are linked together by hardware. Maybe somebody will come up with a cute pointing device driver in a few months?

Hot Swapping

Hot swapping works great in combination with linux. However, you should have the CDROM plugged in while booting linux since linux scans the IDE bus only while booting. Another alternative is to append hdc=cdrom to the boot string. In case the CDROM is not in the computer, you will get a whole bunch of error messages that can be ignored. Other alternatives might be:

• Adding support for rescanning the IDE bus to the linux kernel. Any volunteers?
• Compiling the IDE subsystem as module and booting linux from an initrd (initial ramdisk).

Suspension and Hibernation (Suspend to Disk)

The notebook may be put either into suspend mode by pressing the power button (don't worry, for turning it off, you have to press the power button for 5 seconds!) or into hibernate mode.

However, if you put the notebook computer into suspend/hibernate mode, the computer may crash if X is running and your current virtual console. A simple workaround is to switch to a different console before putting the computer into suspend/hibernate mode. Simply press Ctrl-Alt-F1, Fn-F12 for hibernation (instead of Fn-F12).

Quirks

Nearly every notebook computer on the market has its quirks and so does the HP Omnibook 4150 has some:

• When you boot the computer with the CDROM drive inserted and replace it with the weight saving module afterwards, the computer will not cleanly suspend to disk, no matter whether you are running Linux or Windows. Seems to be a BIOS problem since all other combinations seem to work fine. I tried to call HP customer support and she told me that linux is not supported and that I shoul install the Windows95 hotswap tools (which does not work either). Yes, I should have knows, but I was just curious since I never had the ?!?pleasure?!? to use a service hotline.
• The trackpoint's press-to-select feature (only usable under Windows, at least I did not yet find a driver for Linux yet) does not seem to work well. When this feature is enabled, the computer sometimes interprets a keystroke as a press-to-select event. Tell me, if you do not have this problem. I have seen it on two (of two) HP Omnibooks so far.
• It uses the Neomagic Sound Chip which is not supported in Linux. The commercial OSS driver will work, but does not support this chip officially.
• The windows recovery CDROM is completely drainbead (=worse than braindead).

Windows Recovery CDROM

For some strange reasons, I am still using Powerpoint for my slides, so I reinstalled Windows from the recovery CD. Here some goodies:

• The CDROM is encrypted to make it difficult to misuse it (for people with a low IQ).
• The CDROM repartitions the hard drive and removes all pre-existing partitions (at least that's what it says). Nice service, isn't it?

However, after a short analysis, there is a simple way to get around the repartition service (the instructions apply to the german version of the recovery CDROM, but the explanations should apply to other versions as well):

1. Create your DOS partitions under linux (using fdisk).
2. Insert the bootable recovery CDROM and restart your computer.
3. Choose your keyboard layout and exit the installation procedure by choosing the last menu item (MSDOS mode).
4. Format your Windows partition(s). Not really necessary.
5. Issue wr_pn /w XXXX_F where XXXX stands for the operating system tag (W95 in my case). The valid operating system and their tags can be found out using dir [CDROM]:\recovery\*.tag. The CDROM drive is mounted on g: after booting the recovery CDROM.
6. Reboot your computer and the installation should proceed as usual.

Since this recovery CDROM is extraordinary nice, it even nstalls Microsoft Internet Explorer (4.?) without asking. However, in case you dislike MSIE, you can avoid it. Near the end of the installation, you may login into your computer. However, as soon as you log in, you the setup for MSIE starts up and there is no cancel button. However, you can kill the setup by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del and terminating the setup task.

Final Remarks

Now, have fun and enjoy your computer. It's a cute notebook.

Thomas Gschwind