Note: This article was written in 2002 and were just recently transfered here for reference. There may be many differences with newer kernels.

I bought a bigger harddrive than the original with 800 MB. It's an IBM Travelstar with 6GB. For using a bigger harddrive than 2GB you may need to update the bios. I'm using the latest version and experienced no problems…

I configured the Omnibook as a dualboot machine with the following partitions:

/dev/hda1  3GB   Win95 FAT2
/dev/hda2  2,9GB Linux
/dev/hda3  100MB Linux swap

The Swap-partition may be somehow to big. I'm considering to unmount it permanently to avoid unessessary harddrive-access (and faster batterydrain)

For automatic spindown of the disc i use the noflushd-demon. Simply install it and change the timeout in /etc/default/noflushd to the desired value (I use 2 Minutes).

I've not tested possible speed enhancements through using the hdparm utility, yet.

The PCMCIA Controler is identified as followed by the pci-subsystem:

00:04.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1130 (rev 04)
00:04.1 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1130 (rev 04)

Nowadays there is PCMCIA-Support included in the kernelsource. Unfortunatly these drivers don't work very good for me. (Hotplugging does not work) So I compiled the drivers and the needed utils myself.

Make sure you don't have the debian package of the pcmcia tools installed (we don't want to mess around with old files):

#> dpkg --purge pcmcia-cs

Now get the latest Kernelsources and build a kernel without PCMCIA-support

Download the latest PCMCIA package from http://pcmcia-cs.sourceforge.net and extract the sources to /usr/src. After cd'ing into the new directory build everything with

$> make config
$> make all
#> make install

4. Create the needed symlinks to /etc/init.d/pcmcia with

#> update-rc.d pcmcia defaults 11 89

5. Reboot the new kernel. The PCMCIA-services should start up like followed:

Starting PCMCIA services: modulesLinux PCMCIA Card Services 3.1.26
   kernel build: 2.4.5 #2 Fri Jun 15 22:11:54 CEST 2001
   options:  [pci] [cardbus] [apm] [pnp]
PnP: PNP BIOS installation structure at 0xc00ff000
PnP: PNP BIOS version 1.0, entry at e8000:33e1, dseg at e8000
Intel PCIC probe: <6>PCI: Found IRQ 9 for device 00:04.0
PCI: Found IRQ 11 for device 00:04.1

   TI 1130 rev 04 PCI-to-CardBus at slot 00:04, mem 0x10000000
     host opts [0]: [clkrun irq 10] [serial pci & irq] [pci irq 9] [lat 64/32] [bus 2/5]
     host opts [1]: [clkrun irq 10] [serial pci & irq] [pci irq 11] [lat 64/32] [bus 6/9]
     PCI irq 9 test failed
     ISA irqs (scanned) = 3,15 polling interval = 1000 ms
  cardmgr.

Insert a PCMCIA card. You should hear two high beeps when the card is initialised. A low beep means something went wrong. → check your syslogs then.

The graphics adapter is a Neomagic card. I'm running a vesa-framebuffer driver on it, for getting a higher resolution in textmode. To enable the Frambuffer simply pass 'vga=771' to the kernel in /boot/grub/menu.lst. There is also a neomagic X-server available but I use the framebuffer-server (fbdev) because it was easier to install

For getting the sound work, I had to do some tweaks. I applied the patches mentioned at mobilix.org:

In /usr/src/linux/drivers/sound/sound_config.h find the following line (its line number 37 in kernel 2.4.4)

#define DSP_BUFFSIZE            (64*1024)

and change it to

#define DSP_BUFFSIZE            (32*1024)

In /usr/src/linux/drivers/sound/sb_mixer.c find an array of initial values called sb_default_levels (line 140 in kernel 2.4.4). Change the value on the line marked /\* Mic \*/ from 0x1010 to 0x0000 to avoid feedbacknoises.

With compiling the PCMCIA drivers as modules it works also as a module. I inserted the following line to /etc/modules to load the sounddrivers automatically.

sb io=0x220 irq=5 dma=1 dma16=5 esstype=0

The VLSI driver is now in the 2.4 kernelseries and works fine.

The omnibook has a cool “snap out” mouse which speaks the ps/2 protocol (/dev/psaux). Unfortunatly the newest versions of the gpm (General purpose mousemanager) does not work with it anymore (I don't know why). I simply installed an older package of it and set the packagestate to hold in dselect for getting it work.

Xfree 4 works fine with the mouse configured as a ps/2 mouse on /dev/gpmdata.

See these Sites also:

• Linux on a HP Omnibook: http://tuxmobil.org/hp800e.html
• Linux on Laptops: http://www.linux-laptop.net
• HP-Support: http://www.hp.com/cposupport/prodhome/hpomnibook8375.html
• http://tldp.org/HOWTO/PCMCIA-HOWTO.html - PCMCIA HOWTO
• http://tuxmobil.org/pcmcia_linux.html - Unoffically Supported PCMCIA Cards