i've tried the armada 7800 with all of the distros listed above. in mandrake 10 however, i was unable to install it because i needed the additional drivers floppy. i'm sure there's a way to get it to work, but i just gave up. in yoper, i couldn't install it because the yoper install requires at least 3000MB of free space, and the hdd in the armada i have is only about 2800MB. this is unfortunate, especially since the initial yoper install takes up much less space than that.

other than problems with mandrake and yoper, installs went smoothly with the other distros i tried. the only distro to automatically recognize and install drivers for the ancient soundcard was suse. so i'd rank the armada 7800's compatability a 10 with suse, but of course you can always get the other distros to work well with it by downloading drivers.

if you don't mind an old, slow, heavy laptop, this'll work fine. you can buy them for cheap, and if configured correctly with linux, they work just as good as any new computer...sort of.

I've been testing this Armada 7800 I bought from my friend - linux runs on almost anything, right? :)

when i got it, it was a P2 266mhz w 64mb ram, 5gb hdd, cd-rom (which does not read RWs), sound.. and pretty much it...

i added a pcmcia wifi 802.11b card and upped the ram to 256mb.

before that, i went crazy and tried slax (the one listed above).... and it actually ran :) although you could not do anything as the memory was down right eaten away, it did load up the desktop interface and all.

after the upgrade to 256, it runs ok. but i wouldn't recommend slax se on it..

whax i tried before i upped the ram, and totally went bonkers when it tried to load the modules.. (cd drive errors) after upping the ram, it passed without cd drive errors and successfully loaded up the desktop enviroments (kde, fluxbox)

-under whax, network card was found and all went smooth!
-under slax, the sound was detected at the console, but when running the desktop enviorment, it slowwed too much to tell if it worked or not (didn't try the sound after the upgrade)
-slackware rocked. did a small install, and most things worked - but the sound didn't work (i didn't try to get it to work as i saw it work in slax, thus if you copied those settings, it would probably work?)

i am currently setting up lfs and trying it out :) wish me luck :P