So, I got this Compaq Armada 7800 as a toy to play with. I figured I would put Ubuntu on it, just to see if I could.

Machine has a Pentium II, some unknown amount of RAM (haven’t been motivated enough to find out yet), a 5GB hard drive and had Windows 2000.

The CD-ROM drive is failing and does not read burned CD’s well. I tried several times with a couple of different discs to get Ubuntu 7.10 desktop installed, but ran into multiple problems, including disk read errors and weird failure at 15% while “detecting file systems”.

I am now trying the ALT CD instead, and it seems to be doing a better job, but because the drive keeps doing the “I am a very stupid CD-ROM and I am going to keep speeding up and slowing down even though I have done so 20 times and I should already know that I can’t read this disk at full speed, but let me just try one more time…” problem, it is being slow about things. Oh, did I mention it’s a Pentium II? *meh*

I don’t really have any use for this machine in a practical sense, but I am curious if I can get it running a “modern” operating system. I like a challenge….