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 :)