HP Omnibook xt6050 with Linux?!

[Ken Ekholm]

Can I run RedHat 8.0 or Debian
3.0 on HP Omnibook xt6050?

[Lorenzo Facello]

Sure, you can install Red Hat,
but you have to create first partitions:
1: 70MB to start Linux
where lilo points
2: FAT32 (space that you want)
3: Linux ( " " " " )
- /boot
- /
- swap
You have to decide the spaces.
For more description try to make a trip in google.

[Bruce Copeland]

Take a look at:

http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/hp.html

Several of the links on that site should help you with the particulars of Linux on your omnibook.

Bruce

[Ken Ekholm]

How about the graphic interface? Does it work fine
under RedHat 8.0?!

[Bruce Copeland]

That depends on your specific graphics adapter. (The hardware on most of these systems evolves over time.) In general, any of the Radeon M6 adapters should work fine. The Radeon IGP systems generally work (unaccelerated) with a VESA framebuffer driver. Don't count on getting this by probing during installation; you should select VESA driver (generic). You can make further manual tweaks to your /etc/X11/XF86Config file after installation.

Bruce

[Lorenzo Facello]

I suggest you to use Gnome...
(there aren't too differnces between gnome and kde)

[Ken Ekholm]

I think that I have the Intel i830 graphic chipset in my HP Omnibook xt6050 notebook.

I have heard it may not work probably with that graphic chipset in Linux? Is that true?

[Ken Ekholm]

Is there someone who knows about this problem?

[Bruce Copeland]

I suspect no one wants to touch this with a 10-foot pole. The i830 works fine or practically not at all under Linux, depending on the bios. The real question is whether HP has provided an appropriate bios upgrade for the xt6050 that gives sufficient system RAM to the video subsystem. You could check with HP support to see if any bios newer than December 2002 is available.

Bruce

[Jakob Buron]

I've got an xt6050 with i830 video chipset as well, and I haven't been able to run X (the graphical shell) for Linux in resolutions higher than 1024*768 in 8-bit color.

The reason seems to be, that the i830 uses share video memory and by default it only allocates 1 mb from the system ram. The intention of the chipset designers was that a BIOS setting should make users able to choose a larger video memory, but the HP bioses don't have this option! Windows drivers use a workaround which forces the i830 to allocate more video memory when the OS is loaded. But how to do this is proprietary information and hasn't been implemented in Open Source drivers yet, to my knowledge.

Last distro and bios I tried was Red Hat 7.2 and HP bios 1.33. Has anyone had succes using newer versions?