This page is no longer maintained by me, as I don't have access to my old laptop. I would therefore like to transfer this page to anyone who is interested in maintaining it. Mail me at pere@td.org.uit.no if you are interested.

HP Omnibook 4000C - Linux page

I created this page after searching the web for information about the HP Omnibook 4000C. I did not find anything, so I created my own. This is most of the information I found useful to configure my HP Omnibook 4000C for Linux.

4000C contains an 16bit sound-card and an infrared sender/receiver. The IR-device is /dev/{ttyS1,cua1}. The tracking ball has an PS/2 busmouse interface.

Kernel configuration

 All this is tried on Linux kernel v.1.3.59.

The option Pocket and portable adaptors is not needed to use PCMCIA cards.

Advanced Power Management configuration

Ignore USER SUSPEND: N
Enable PM at boot time: N
This seems to be important to get a stable system.
Make CPU Idle calls when idle: Y
Enable console blanking using APM: N
Console blanking was not supported on linux 1.3.75

Sound configuration

Windows gives me the following information about the sound facilities: 
ESS AudioDrive ES688
  I/O port 220
  IRQ        7
  DMA        1 size 32
ESS AudioDrive MIDI
Brian Vinter reported IRQ 5 from Windows 95. This is normal, as the IRQ and DMA can be changed in the bios setup.

It seems to be compatible with Soundblaster Pro. With a simple configuration file I managed to get stereo sound. Copy this to /etc/soundconf and run make config in /usr/src/linux/drivers/sound/.

XFree86 configuration

The 4000c seems to be using the Western Digital 90C24A chipset. This is supported by the XF86_SVGA server. It has 512k videoram. I have a sample XF86Config which gives you resolution 640x480. Copy this file to /etc/XF86Config or /etc/X11/XF86Config.

My screen is screwed up

 Sometime, after leaving X, the screen gets completely screwed up. This is due to a bug in the chipset. To restore the screen, press fn F5.

Problems with PCMCIA

 Dag Brattli has experimented with two different Ethernet-cards and discovered many problems.

"3Com 3c589C Etherlink III worked with pcmcia-cs-2.7.6 but not with pcmcia-cs-2.8.6 and 2.8.7. 'if_port=3' must be present in /etc/pcmcia/config, or /etc/pcmcia/config.opts to get the card to work at all. 'exclude 0x300-0x30f' in the same file seems to avoid some strange conflict.

IBM CCA Ethernet II works with all the pcmcia-cs versions tried. This card needs 'mem_speed=600' in /etc/pcmcia/config or /etc/pcmcia/config.opts if it exists. This improves transfer speed and prevents filling /usr/adm/messages with UDP error messages."

More information

Acknowledgments

 Thanks to Dag Brattli <dagb@stud.cs.uit.no> for the XF86Config-file and lots of other info. Thanks to Brian Vinter <vinter@cs.uit.no> for some informations on the screen.
Petter Reinholdtsen - pere@td.org.uit.no