Omnibook Fixed
Thanks to the fine folks on the Omnibook Mailing List (a list for GNU/Linux users of the HP OmniBook line of laptops), my laptop is back in working order. (Interestingly, the top three results in google on a search for “omnibook” are all Linux-related at the moment, and the entire first page of results of “hp omnibook” are all Linux-related as well). Within a couple of hours of posting my report that my hard drive was making clicking sounds and spontaneously spinning down and crashing the system, I had received numerous helpful suggestions for fixing this common problem.
So I took the whole thing apart, added some Darice “Foamies” (“No Messy Glue”) in between the hard drive controller cable and the case, put it back together (probably not putting the right screws in the right places), and voila, all better.
I’ve chronicled the repair with my digital camera, and will be posting instructions and photos soon for future OmniBook owners who will inevitably travel down this path.
One poster to the list made the following interesting suggestion, which I find quite appealing:
Perhaps we need free hardware, besides free software?
I mean, someone who produces for the sake of having something working for a reasonable amount of time and in a way that most of us can fix it if it breaks.
The ability to fix it yourself (or the freedom to tinker) is a core part of the free software movement. There’s no reason why the principles shouldn’t extend to hardware as well, despite the trend today towards planned obsolence in devices, rather than repairability.