HP Omnibook 800 CT
 

So my dad gave me his old laptop. HP Omnibook 800 CT. Pentium 166 MMX. 80 MB RAM. This laptop doesn't have a CD-ROM drive built in. I was lucky (if you want to call it that) enough to find the backpack CD drive on eBay, however, to hook up this drive you need a SCSI cable and the docking station. I have a docking station but no SCSI cable. Anyway, a guy gave me an adaptor that will allow me to hook up the laptop's hard drive to my desktop IDE interface. I haven't tried it yet but I plan on installing Redhat 9 on the laptop using this adaptor and then putting the hard drive back into the laptop. Does anyone have any experience in this? Will Redhat 9 run on this laptop? (<---Dumb question) Anyway, I just wanted to know if anyone has any feedback or experience on the subject.

Thanks,
Phekno

RH 9.0 is somewhat of a RAM pig, I think the installer freaks if you have less then 32Mb of RAM or it might even by 64.

Also, you don't need to install with a CD, you can download a net-install floppy image, and another floppy image for pcmcia drivers and do the install directly from the web.

However, for this age of a machine I would recommend trying either Slackware or Debian, they're a bit more of a headache to install, but they're much kinder on older hardware.

Also, an 80Mb drive I kinda doubt, if its a P1, its at least a 1/2 Gig... probably.

Cheers,

Finegan

The notebook has 80MB of RAM not disk space. It has like 2 GB of disk space. I don't have any experience with Debian or Slackware but I am not scared to try. I am just kinda bored and want somewhat of a challenge. I ultimately would like to use the laptop to play MP3s in my car under some kind of Linux Distro. I don't know exactly which one yet. It is not necessary to have X installed on it but it woudn't hurt either. That is unless you know of really good CLI based MP3 player software. Thanks for the help.

Later,
Phekno

I installed SuSE7.3 on a 800CT with the 100mHz processor. It installed without a hitch and picked up all the hardware.

All you need to know about Linux on the HP OmniBook 800 ist a my report at http://tuxmobil.org/hp800e.html , hopefully ;-) Werner