Linux on Laptops Sponsored by LinuxCertified Inc.

I have used Slackware Linux on 3 Compaq LTEs, a 5150, 5280 and a 5300.

In this article I only comment on a couple of features of the LTE5000 series laptops so you should also read the contributions of others. Those are comprehensive. Some are on this Linux on Laptops site and I have found one other.

The main features of those laptops are:
150MHz processor. 48M RAM, standard. Cardbus (improved PCMCIA), 2 slots.
No USB (hardware details at the bottom of this page)
1 to 2 Gb HD
They are an old laptop with wonderful part swapping ... HD, floppy, CD, battery. You can just unclip those components and click in another one. The hard drives are in an aluminium caddy. Even if you can't get another of these you can still change the hard drives easily on Australian models by just unscrewing the caddy and changing the HD (Zack Smith in the US revealed that his caddy is sealed).

General reccommendation for Compaq LTEs:

GET 'EM!

You can juggle hard drives and system setups till you're dizzy ... and learn all about system destruction and building, and other guru stuff. My brain has rusted up but you could become a sysadmin or laval hacker by mucking around with these things.

I only offer advice on configuring the display and a bit of a remark on the cardbus. There is more advice on this site and also Chris Beggy wrote a large document called "Linux on the Compaq LTE5200 Laptop".

My system setup:
Dual booting using Ranish Partition Manager to boot Win95/98 or Slackware Linux
Environment: console (text only, I can't be bothered with a GUI)

Me:
Incompetent configurator (hacker status = hopeless embryo (still truggling with cell division)). Ask me any questions incase I might be able to answer one.

Documentation:
Deep in the bowels of the HP "support and drivers" website there are manuals in .pdf format as well as some "white papers" on the the LTE5000 series.

Bugs:
These are suspected hardware bugs on my laptops. There may be some intermittent breakdowns of power supply to some components. Since these are intermittent faults I haven't yet had the chance to troubleshoot them. The screen sometimes plays up and I suspect there also could have been a rare connector fault somewhere else in the system.

The most obvious one is the screen. Usually at the start of each session it behaves somewhat like a TV that is having slight reception problems. A few sets of pixel rows start behaving erratically. The rows of pixels seem to change colour or move erratically a small distance to the right (not a fixed move, but a quick, erratic shuffling - no fixed displacement). And it's always fixed by tapping the edges of the display. Then it settles down in less than a minute.

The display of an LTE5280 of mine sometimes switches to all white which can only be fixed by suspending the system or rebooting or complete shutdown/startup cycle.

Then a couple of times, soon after taking delivery of 2 of the LTE5000 series laptops there was an error message a second after powerup that referred to a missing operating system, "please replace disk." That symptom persisted a few times and I eventually used a rescue floppy to reformat the hard drive.

Months later I woke up to the possibility that there could merely have been some briefly faulty connection in the guts of the computer (one pin of the disk connector?) while nothing was wrong with disk data after all.

I consider these trivial bugs.

The CD drive:
I haven't tried configuring my Linux setup to run the CD drive. My reason isn't system related, just apathy ... I'm more concerened with internet communication. It works in DOS by intalling a standard driver so I guess the drive would work under Linux if I just installed a driver (see the Linux Driver website). It's a TEAC CD-46E.

The display:
My LTEs all have an 800x600 screen but for some reason only a VGA (640x480) portion is used at bootup. I use only the console environment and the SVGATextMode utility to use the full 800x600 screen area. Well, almost the full screen. There's still a blank strip at the top that I can't configure SVGATextMode to use, presumably because that utility expects to deal only with CRTs, not LCDs. I guess you could configure a GUI to use the full screen though.

Using SVGATextMode:
That has a similar configuration layout as for an X server. You use one or more mode lines. After trial and error I settled on this mode line that keeps me happy:
"100x36x8" 25.2 800 800 801 801 540 600 601 601 font 8x15

Cardbus:
(This is still often called PCMCIA)
I've only tried a modem card (Xircom CEM II Modem/Ethernet) which works without re-configuration, and on of my mates use the Ethernet interface without problems. As for other cards - get a Linux compatible one (see the Hardware-HOWTO or the hardware compatibility website). I suspect hardware manufacturers hardly ever make a Linux driver for their stuff. There's no USB port so you could find a cardbus USB card handy.

And finally, this is a report from the lshw utility available somewhere on the net (the "doomhammer" is just my chosen hostname on that HD)

doomhammer