RedHat Linux 7.x on the HP Omnibook 6000

This is where I describe some of the hoops I had to jump through to get RedHat 7 to live happily on my Omnibook 6000. These are the notes for 7.0, I'm in the process of migrating to 7.1-BETA-Wolverine right now because I messed up my ext2 filesystem and I was looking for an excuse anyhow. Yes, I had great backups of everything, so it went well. I'll be adding 7.1-BETA-Wolverine notes here soon.

HP6000-specific notes

Advanced Power Management
RH7's APM has some problems sleeping and resuming if you try to do it while X is on the screen. This can be solved by upgrading to a RawHide apmd RPM. I'd recommend this one. This issue is solved in 7.0.90-Fisher.

Sound Support
Originally, I was using the OSS Commercial sound drivers, but they didn't support apm, so I made apm modifications to make sure it unloaded nicely and restarted nicely. These modifications have made it in to the Rawhide apmd RPMs, and they're cleaner there than my version, so if you're using OSS, look in /etc/sysconfig/apm and play with RESTORESOUND and SOUNDMODULES. The RedHat 7.0-Updates kernel-2.2.17-14 RPMs include support for the Maestro3 without apm issues, all you have to do is insmod soundcore, ac97_codec and maestro3. RedHat 7.0.90-Fisher has full support for the Maestro3 in sndconfig.

Ethernet Support
The only issue with the Ethernet is APM. When you sleep the laptop, the drivers don't reload themselves correctly. I've written a script to take care of this issue, so that when the laptop wakes up, everything is good. Just save this file as /etc/sysconfig/apm-scripts/apmcontinue and make it executable. This has to be done in both 7.0 and 7.0.90-Fischer.

Module Bay Support
If you pop out the module when the laptop is running, there's an 87.4% chance that it'll freeze solid. I've written a script that you can run before popping out the module and then after when the new one's in, and the laptop won't crash. I'd recommend putting it in /usr/local/sbin/hotswap. Just read the script to get the syntax. I haven't tried not using this script under 7.0.90-Fisher yet.

DVD Playing Support
This has only been tried under RedHat 7.0.90-Fischer, but it worked like a charm. I've updated the hotswap script to accomodate the DVD module, as well as the apmcontinue script to make sure it has DMA mode on to keep from dropping frames. You'll need two packages for this to work - the ati_xv driver from http://www.linuxvideo.org/gatos/ and the xine RPM from http://redhat.aldil.org/pub/RPMS/redhat-7.0/xine/. Bear in mind that the RPM with decss might be illegal in your country. Once you've downloaded those in to /tmp, you can get it installed like this:

RedHat 7.0 notes

Graphical OS Selector
I don't like the graphical screen, I prefer the lilo prompt. You can get rid of it by removing the "message" line from /etc/lilo.conf and running lilo.

Updates
I can't emphasize how important it is to keep up to date with packages. Really. Do it. The updates are Here and the document explaining how to update your kernel is here.

DHCP
I use my laptop a lot on DHCP, but I also need to use it without the network. The problem was that it took quite some time for /etc/rc.d/init.d/network to time out on the DHCP requests. I reduced the timeouts in two ways. First, in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup I changed DHCPCDARGS to be "-t 5", and I added "timeout 1" and "retries 0" lines to /etc/pump.conf