Debian / Testing (Etch) Linux on a HP Omnibook 500 Ultraportable.

This report is listed at TuxMobil - Linux on laptops, notebooks, PDAs and mobile phones

This machine has many success stories of Linux being installed on it,
and this one is no different.  Auto-install from http://lkcl.net/d-i/
by using the CD made from http://lkcl.net/d-i/debian-installer/
was relatively quick and definitely painless [WARNING: the install CD
asks absolutely ZERO questions and will DESTROY anything that's already on
the machine!  if you feel uncomfortable with this, use a standard
Debian / Testing CD which will do just as well]

When i say painless I mean that, unlike all of the other installs that I've
looked at, which had some glitches of some kind, I didn't encounter any
glitches - but then again I haven't pushed the machine particularly hard.
However, you really need to be aware of this, which is that APM
(power management) apparently has some serious caveats.

Normally, I would give all sorts of configuration hints and tips, but
they are now all encoded into the Auto-install from http://lkcl.net/d-i/
so I don't have to!  Do take a look at the kdedesktop class, which does
a LOT of auto-configuring.

XOrg went on the machine, straight away, detected and configured everything.
The standard alsa utils weren't quite happy with reconfiguring the
volume to 'sensible' levels (/etc/init.d/alsa-utils sets some of the
outputs to 80% and unmutes them), so i used kmix and had to manually
set them, and ended up scaring my baby with the KDE startup :)

Anyway: the obligatory lspci, cpuinfo and meminfo can be found
here - bizarrely, the cpuinfo lists
the processor as only running at 256Mhz, when it's actually a PIII
700.  So, my guess is: the CPU speedstep is working, without any
help from Linux :)