The laptop was delivered Win XP Home pre-installed. Luckily the Fat32 partition was on towards the end of the 20G hard drive and there was nice 15 G empty space after the hibernation partition. This way the "Diagnostic tools" are left intact so you do not need to touch the windows cd:s ever =). After making the /, swap, /usr and /home partitions with the wizard in mandrake's installer the hard disk looked like this: 

Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 2432 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System

/dev/hda1             1         3     24066   a0  IBM Thinkpad hibernation
  /dev/hda2             4      1788  14338012+   5  Extended
/dev/hda3   *      1789      2426   5124735    c  Win95 FAT32 (LBA)
  /dev/hda5             4        66    506016   83  Linux
  /dev/hda6            67        97    248976   82  Linux swap
  /dev/hda7            98       479   3068383+  83  Linux
  /dev/hda8           480      1788  10514511   83  Linux

UPDATE: Windows partition was sent to obilivion, here's how it looks now. 


  Disk /dev/hda: 20.0 GB, 20003880960 bytes
  255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 2432 cylinders
  Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

  Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
  /dev/hda1   *         1         3     24066   a0  IBM Thinkpad hibernation
  /dev/hda2             4      2432  19510942+   5  Extended
  /dev/hda5             4        66    506016   83  Linux
  /dev/hda6            67        97    248976   82  Linux swap
  /dev/hda7            98       479   3068383+  83  Linux
  /dev/hda8           480      1788  10514511   83  Linux
  /dev/hda9          1789      2091   2433816    b  Linux
  /dev/hda10         2092      2432   2739019+  83  Linux

and the mount points are (in case you figure why some many partitions: 


      /dev/hda5 on / type ext3 (rw,noatime)
      /dev/hda7 on /usr type ext3 (rw,noatime)
      /dev/hda8 on /home type ext3 (rw,noatime)
      /dev/hda9 on /opt type ext3 (rw,noatime)
      /dev/hda10 on /var type ext3 (rw,noatime)

Everything except modem was detected (and supported) correctly by Mandrake 8.2, 9.0 and 9.1 (kernel =>2.4.18).

The touchpad

Touchpad did re-enable itself randomly even though the indicator light is off, changing the setting for external pointing device to "auto" fixed the problem. Touchpad itself is a IMPS/2 compatible wheel mouse and works fine under gpm and also in X. I use a trekker ("genuine microsoft") wheel mouse for external pointing device so there is minimum hassle since they both use same protocol. Don't know what happens if you plug a logitech in the external port and have the internal pad activated. So this is the only occasion I'm going to say "go for microsoft or compatible"...

The display & graphics

Graphics adapter is S3 Savage4 aka Via Twister aka ProSavage [PM133] AGP. LCD panel works fine as Generic High Frequency SVGA, 1024x768 at 70 Hz. Here's my X configuration You might also want to pass vga=791 option in lilo to get 1024x768 16bpp console. You need to compile FBDev into kernel to be able to use the full console mode. On 2.4.* kernels brightness adjustment (Fn+F1, Fn+F2) did not work, neither did video device selection (Fn+F5). Switching to kernel 2.5.27 solved the problem. TV-out works, VGA-out works fine too, but you need the s3switch -utility ( RPM , Deb ) to change the video output device (or to turn LCD on while projector is attached to vga-out). Since kernel 2.5.6<something> AGPgart has support for VIA chipsets. Hooray!

Networking

Integrated 10/100 nic is a VIA VT6102 Rhine-II (10/100) and the via-rhine driver works 100%. It seems to support mii and crc32 too.

Modem is VIA VT 8501 MVP4 Modem (a winmodem perhaps?) It shows in lspci -v as follows: 



00:11.6 Communication controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. Intel 537 [AC97 Modem] (rev 20)
  Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company: Unknown device 0028
  Flags: medium devsel, IRQ 10
  I/O ports at 1800 [disabled] [size=256]
  Capabilities: [d0] Power Management version 2

I haven't spent any time whatsoever trying to find out whether it is possible to get it work under Linux nor how to do it since I don't need it.

Sound

Sound device is VIA VT82C686A/B South Bridge. Works fine. Alsa works too. Volume control/mute button ACPI-events are not supported (yet) though so you need to control the volume from xmms etc.

Power management

In 2.4.* kernels ACPI support is only for power button and lid button so it is somewhat hindered. Apm worked fine under 2.4.*, though after waking from suspend, network device hanged the computer completely (workaround was to rmmod before suspend and NOT TO insmod after wakeup), sound device seemed to hog a lot of resources after suspend too but as long as you didn't play MP3's it worked quite fine. ACPI on 2.4.* was somewhat hindered and also seemed to go oops on power off. On kernel 2.5.27 I didn't even try apm since ACPI support is much further there, far from perfect though. Nevertheless brightness adjustment and Fn+F5 seem to work straight from boot. Acpi support seems to develop nicely so we just have to wait some. (If some developer needs someone to provide acpi-tables, debug messages etc or to test ACPI on new omnibooks, contact me . Sleep state S3 seems to work now (kernel 2.6.0-test6), hooray!

USB & PCMCIA

Both buses are detected correctly and show in relevant locations (/var/lib/pcmcia/stab and /prov/bus/usb). Since I do not own(!) any usb or pcmcia devices whatsoever, there features are untested. The interface devices are anyways "CardBus bridge: O2 Micro, Inc.: Unknown device 6972 for pcmcia" and "USB Controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. UHCI USB (rev 1e) (prog-if 00 [UHCI])" for usb.

Conclusion

A fine laptop, almost full support under linux. I'd say a safe choice. Just compile the newest kernel to get the most acpi features. Here's my .config for 2.5.70 and full output of lspci -v . If you happen to need some else information, mail me .

History

The laptop was running Mandrake 9.1 (Bamboo) and kernel 2.6.0-test6 and everything works quite fine. Config is pretty much the same as 2.5.70 , though.

After that, the laptop ran Gentoo Linux 1.4 for over 2 years.

Update

Now the laptop has a 30G disk, 512Mb memory and is running Ubuntu 5.10 (breezy badger). Everything works straight out of the box, including the 29€ 54g WLAN card (topcom skyr@cer pro).