RHEL on HP OmniBook 6000

[joseph pareti]

I have been able to operate rhel-3-U3-i386-ws on this laptop, but when installing rhel 4 the system "freezes" when attempting to format the /boot partition. Which leads to a more fundamental question: this system was shipping a few years BEFORE rhel 4: are there any reasons why it should not work? How can one determine what devices can operate a given RHEL release?

[Matti_Kurkela · Accepted solution]

I used to run Linux on OmniBook 6000 in year 2003 or so, although it was Debian, not RHEL.

The PC world is so diverse that it's impossible to test all hardware/OS combinations; you can determine what's officially supported by RedHat by looking at their Hardware Compatibility Lists, but outside that, the only way to know is to test it. However, I think OmniBook 6000 was a pretty Linux-friendly system.

Things to check:
- does the BIOS have a "virus protection" feature? If it does, switch it off. It usually works by blocking write access to the first track of the HDD; of course installing a new OS needs to write a new MBR and boot loader to it.

- have you tried Ctrl-Alt-F2, Ctrl-Alt-F3 etc. keystrokes to access the installer log, a shell prompt and the installation kernel log when the installer "freezes"? They might give you more information.

- an OmniBook 6000 is likely to be pretty old at this point: are you sure the internal HDD is not failing?

If it is, it's pretty easy to remove the old HDD and swap in a new one. If I recall correctly, just remove two screws clearly marked with a HDD symbol from the bottom of the laptop, then slide the HDD access door down to unlock it, then pull the door outward to get the HDD within its installation frame out of the laptop. Remove the old HDD from the frame (really tiny screws!), and don't forget the connector adapter plugged into the old HDD: you'll need to transfer it to the new HDD.

MK

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Later releases in general do better on hardware support.

Low end HP laptops ship without drivers or real hardware support. Best you can do is hope the needed drivers are built into the Linux Kernel. Newer releases are better than old in this case.

SEP

[joseph pareti]

Thanks for the replies; I have now installed red hat "9" (kernel 2.4.20-8, codename "Shrike"), pretty old... So that excludes disk drive problems, but I am still surprised that RHEL 4 AS failed to install. I couldn't find anything strange in the bios either...

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

RHEL 4 failed to install because it lacks drivers for this hardware. Most likely networking.


If you check the support on this hardware it lists Windows only. Linux obviously does work, but you have to take a step up in price to get an HP laptop that has actual HP support for Linux. They seriously did not even bother to create Linux drivers for this system.

In this scenario you rely on what is built into the Linux Kernel, which in this case was not quite enough.

SEP