It appears that my laptop is back up and running again, and in better form than before!
I went ahead & reinstalled everything, and after finally remembering that XFree86 4+ doesn’t work at all on this system, I’ve got XWindows up and running, and I’ve even got a browser that doesn’t kill my poor Pentium-90 system. Heck, I’m even writing this post from it right now! Mozilla Firebird. Check it out. It takes a little time to start up, but once it’s running it’s lightning-fast. And it uses the Mozilla rendering engine, so it’s got support for just about everything that’s out there on the net (except for MNG/JNG, but that’s a huge debate I don’t want to get into right now).
In case you’re wondering, there’s a few tricks to getting everything working right with recent Linux versions on an HP Omnibook 5000 CTS; here’s the tricks I had to pull to get it working right:
(1) To get the PCMCIA slots working right, you need to add this option to the PCMCIA kernel module: i386_base=0x3480
(2) To get XFree86 working, you need to install the XFree86 3.x support. I’m using debian, so that means I installed xserver-common-v3 and xserver-svga. It’s very important that you do this step, because for the life of me, I couldn’t get XFree86 4.0 to work at all. Then, you need to give debconf the boot (at least, for XF86Config management), and install this config file instead (as /etc/X11/XF86Config)XF86Config for Omnibook 5000CTS
(3) um… I think that’s it so far as actually getting everything running on the box (well, everything I’ve done so far). I’m not so interested in sound right now (that’s what my Archos Jukebox is for), but the sound chip is a pretty standard cs2420, so it should be no problem getting it running with isapnp or alsa.
Note: I installed Debain Woody on this beast, but Woody ships with a 2.2.19 kernel. That’s really unacceptable, so I upgraded to 2.4.20-3-586tsc. Be sure to install the appropriate kernel-modules package, too. I also switched from lilo (which always freaks me out when it reinstalls itself into the bootloader) to grub (which only needs to be reinstalled when it’s upgraded). What way, I can screw around with the kernel options without worrying about the dreaded “L 99 99 99 99 99 99 99”.
Now, my trial with this US Robotics USR2410 card, that’s another thing altogether. I’m glad I didn’t pay that much for it, because it was a pain in the ass getting it to work right. Let me start by saying that I really dislike the fact that USR only provided firmware upgrade software for Windows. Since I’ve always run linux on this laptop (from the day I bought it), this proves a problem. Here’s what I had to do, in order to get it working right (and using the linux-wlan-ng drivers):
I had an extra laptop HD sitting around; I upgraded this machine about 2 years ago, from a 1.2GiB drive to a 4.something GiB drive. I also just happen to have a spare IDE 40-pin to 50-pin convertor sitting around (while I wait for my paycheck, and buy a slimline CD-Rom for my “project” system). I hooked that extra HD up to a system that ws sitting in the corner of my office (it is again, by the way), and formatted it FAT32, installed a DOS system onto it, and copied the win95 cabs onto it (the only version of Windows I ever had a “license” to own/use). Then, I popped that hard drive back into the laptop, and installed Win95. Got it all up and running, then went after the drivers. Let me just say that I’m glad I still have a floppy drive on my workstation; without it, this would have been nigh-impossible (or at the very least, REALLY inconvenient).
I got the drivers installed for the card (it didn’t work, but the drivers detected it). Then I flashed the firmware. I went from version 0.7.3 to 1.4.0. Big version jump, and a heck of a lot of features. The card successfully flashed, and working in Windows, I swapped the hard drives back, and put the linux drive back in. Lo and behold, since I’d already installed the linux-wlan-ng kernel modules, all I had to do was turn the system on, wait for it to boot, and put in the network card. one “ifup wlan0” later, and I’m cruising the net at 11Mb/sec. Now I jsut need to get a couple more batteries for this thing, because the one I have now hasn’t gotten up past a half charge in the 2 days I’ve been using it, and it hasn’t been off the juice in months.
All in all, a fun time. And I did the entire “windows back & forth” in just one morning; I got home from work around 8:30, and I was done by noon. The hardest part was finding the drive.
