Schwicky.net - HP Omnibook xe4400 Stuff

I'm proud to be the owner of a HP Omnibook xe4400. I think I don't need to insist on the fact that it's absolutely impossible to work with the supplied operating system (namely: Microsoft Windows XP). It took no long (I didn't even boot it once) until I threw out all the partitions and installed Gentoo Linux. My favourite Linux distribution (Linux From Scratch) was not really suited as do a lot of testing on this machine.
As it was the first notebook I owned and the first time I made real use of ACPI, it was quite a struggle. I want to share my experience so that others can benefit from it.

Prerequisits

Update to the lastest BIOS availiable.

The kernel

The use of a kernel of the 2.6 branch is highly recommended. The newer releases include a lot of patches to make Linux running on a notebook much smoother, although the processor ACPI module has proven to lock up the notebook since kernel 2.6.5, so just don't build it. If you want to check the temperature of your processor, go for the omnibook module of the omke project.

If you want to use your synaptics touchpad and an USB Mouse simultaneously you should consider to disable the Legacy USB in the BIOS. If loading Linux gets slow, add the compact option to LILO. Your touchpad will be available as /dev/input/mouse0 and the USB Mouse as /dev/input/mouse1.

Software suspend

Well, it used to work. But for what reason ever, the newer releases don't suspend the machine anymore. Instead, they either lock up or restore right after having suspended... I've no real use for suspension at the moment, but I'll look into that issue later on.

Who is this General Failure and why is he reading my disk?

It will be very unlikely that your notebook doesn't run any process you don't need. And of these processes some will keep accessing your hard disk which is really anoying when you want to put the drive in sleep mode to: 1. Save power; 2. Keep your notebook quiet; 3. Work in peace. Have a look at the quietlinux HOWTO to track down the processes.

More detailed and complementary informations yet to come...

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Well, anyway, I was reading this James Bond book, and right away I realized
that like most books, it had too many words. The plot was the same one that
all James Bond books have: An evil person tries to blow up the world, but
James Bond kills him and his henchmen and makes love to several attractive
women. There, that's it: 24 words. But the guy who wrote the book took
*thousands* of words to say it.
Or consider "The Brothers Karamazov", by the famous Russian alcoholic
Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It's about these two brothers who kill their father.
Or maybe only one of them kills the father. It's impossible to tell because
what they mostly do is talk for nearly a thousand pages. If all Russians talk
as much as the Karamazovs did, I don't see how they found time to become a
major world power.
I'm told that Dostoyevsky wrote "The Brothers Karamazov" to raise
the question of whether there is a God. So why didn't he just come right
out and say: "Is there a God? It sure beats the heck out of me."
Other famous works could easily have been summarized in a few words:

* "Moby Dick" -- Don't mess around with large whales because they symbolize nature and will kill you.
* "A Tale of Two Cities" -- French people are crazy.
Dave Barry