Summary

The installation of Suse 6.1 was carried out after re-partitioning of the harddisk by using Partition Magic 4.0. I did not encounter any major difficulties with the standard setup. However, it was not possible to use XFree86. Therefore the X server available from Precision Insight was employed. It had to be adapted to Suse 6.1. In addition, I installed the OSS sound driver. The kernel was recompiled to enable advanced power management. The installation was a time consuming undertaking, but everything worked pretty well then. Recently the system was upgraded to Suse 6.3 without any problems.

Hardware

 Note: Newer models of Omnibook 4150 come with other video and sound chips.

Re-partitioning

The Omnibook 4150 comes with Win98 and Win95 pre-installed. I selected Win98. In order to reduce the FAT 32 partition, I intended to use Partition Magic 4.0 (Windows version). However, this did not work initially. I had to run Norton Disk Doctor (Norton Utilities 4.0) first. It turned out that there were wrong date entries. I reduced the size of the FAT 32 partition to about 2GB.

Installation

It is possible to boot directly from the Suse installation CD (after changing the BIOS settings) and to install Linux. The instructions given in the manual and during setup are quite clear and should be easy to follow. The only trouble was that at a time no more packages were copied on the harddisk although a number of them was still missing. But this is not a big problem. Just leave YAST. The missing files are automatically copied later.

I did not install LILO in the master boot sector, but in the boot sector of the Linux root partition. System Commander 4.0, which I use as boot manager, recognizes the Linux system during installation and automatically inserts a Linux entry in its boot menu.

XFree86

All efforts to use XFree86 (3.3.3.1) which came with Suse 6.1 failed. Fortunately there was a X server for Neomagic chips (XFCom_NeoMagic) available free of charge from Precision Insight (http://www.precisioninsight.com).

Note: this driver is no longer available as it has been incorporated into XFree86 meanwhile (versions from 3.3.4). This means that you can easily avoid all the troubles that I had by installing a newer linux version (e.g. Suse 6.2 or higher). Then you can totally ignore the following text. For some people, however, the instructions given below may still be of interest. So I will keep them for a while.

Take the .tgz file (glibc) of the driver and copy it to any folder (e.g. /opt/neomagic). Un-tar the file (tar xvzf). Do not follow the installation instructions provided as they were made for Red Hat 5.x. Instead do the following (assuming that the .tgz file has been copied to: /opt/neomagic):

cp /opt/neomagic/usr/X11R6/bin/XFCom_NeoMagic /usr/X11R6/bin/XFCom_NeoMagic

ln -sf /usr/X11R6/bin/XFCom_NeoMagic /var/X11R6/bin/X

mv /etc/XF86Config /etc/XF86Config.old (if there is already a XF86Config)

cp /opt/neomagic/etc/X11/XF86Config.neomagic /etc/XF86Config

You should be able to start the server now by typing: startx.

Modify /etc/XF86Config by adding the following line in the Section "Screen":

DefaultColorDepth 16

(e.g. after line: Monitor "Generic Multisync") for 16 bit colour depth (otherwise 8 bit is default).

As I needed a German keyboard layout I have replaced the Section "Keyboard" by the following (from a German Suse /etc/XF86Config file):
 

Section "Keyboard"
Protocol "Standard"
AutoRepeat 500 5
LeftAlt Meta
RightAlt Meta
ScrollLock Compose
RightCtl Control
XkbKeycodes "xfree86"
XkbTypes "default"
XkbCompat "default"
XkbSymbols "us(pc101)"
XkbGeometry "pc"
XkbRules "xfree86"
XkbModel "pc101"
XkbLayout "de"

The last line is for German keyboard layout.

Sound

I decided to use the OSS driver (v3.2.9) which can be obtained from: http://www.4front-tech.com. A demo is included in Suse 6.1 and can be easily installed with YAST. A license is available for 20 US $). It is convenient that adapted versions for a number of distributions are offered. The NeoMagic sound chip at that time was not officially supported ("it works if you have luck"). Indeed, initially it failed to work. It was possible to playback audio CDs, but no wav or midi files. Finally it turned out that you must not run Windows prior to Linux (e.g. start linux with loadlin from a running Windows). If you use Windows you must shutdown (switch off) the notebook prior to starting Linux (a reboot from within Windows is insufficient). If loadlin is used Windows must be started by using the command line option. Alternatively, a boot menu can be incorporated in the config.sys and autoexec.bat files (as described in the Suse manual). If everything works nicely you can start OSS automatically by including the line:

/usr/local/bin/soundon

in the file: /etc/rc.d/boot.local

APM

In order to activate APM it was necessary to compile a new kernel. The APM settings are contained in the section: General Setup. I activated: Advanced Power Management and Power off on shutdown. To ensure that the power off function really works you must edit the script: /sbin/init.d/halt. The line: command="halt" must be changed to: command="halt -p". So far all enegy saving mechanisms (standby, suspend, suspend to disk) seem to work adequately. Further, I installed the package: xapm from the series kpa (KDE alpha applications). This is for battery control and switching to energy saving modes from within the KDE desktop. It appears to work (although it cannot be configured yet).

Note: Suse 6.3 allows to select a boot kernel with activated power management during installation. In this case it is not necessary to compile a new kernel.

Conclusions

The HP Omnibook 4150 is fit for LINUX (apart from that it is a very good notebook which I would certainly recommend to buy). However, there are a number of details which need to be considered during installation. In particular this holds true for the video and sound systems. It is to be hoped that in future Linux installation will become easier. It is not quite understandable why a number of configuration files of different Linux distributions are to be found in different folders (e.g., that XF86Config is sometimes in /etc and sometimes in /etc/X11). This makes Linux life more complicated as it needs to be. On the other hand I must admit that is a great feeling when all problems are solved.

Suse 6.3

Some time ago I upgraded to Suse 6.3 by using the described procedure. The graphic chip was autodetected during installation. As indicated above a kernel with activated power management can be chosen. Thus, the installation has become much more user friendly. I do not believe that anyone will encounter major difficulties.

Author

This page was created by Franz Fiala (franz.fiala@wien.netsurf.at). Last update: May 2000.