Gentoo on Armada 1700

For model (a 1750) 6366/T/6400/D/M/3, click here. For another 1700

Piece	Value	Comment
CPU	300MHz Pentium 2 (P2 Deschutes) 512KB cache
RAM	32MB onboard + 128MB sodimm (1 expansion slot)	Will support a max of 1 added 128MB sodimm
Chipset	Intel 440BX/ZX/DX (AGP disabled) (rev 2)	AGP doesn't matter
IDE Controller	PIIX4 IDE (rev 1) ( 82371AB/EB/MB )	Works, UDMA2 is max
Video Chipset	Chips & Technologies (C&T) 65555 HiQVPro (rev16B)	no 3D but 2D acceleration for X (chips server)
USB	Intel 82371AB/EB/MB PIIX4 USB, 1 connector	uhci or usb-uhci, more connectors would be nice...
Hard Drive	IMB-DADA-25400 (~5GB)	in this case bigger is better :)
Sound	ESS1869	100% Soundblaster compatible, use sb module, or snd-es18xx, see below
PCMCIA	Texas Instruments PCI1220 (rev 2) 2 slots w/cardbus	Work just fine under cardbus and normal PCMCIA
CD-ROM	?x non-removable (easily) ATAPI CD-ROM	Pretty noisy CDROM, works well though
Floppy	1.44MB standard in removable bay	can use a second battery instead
LCD	14"? 1024x768 display	vga=791 for vesafb, 1024x768x16
Touchpad	model unknown, integrated	Works fine, PS/2, 3-btn emulation
Modem	software modem, AFAIK	never used, supposedly drivers for it

Starting out I put a knoppix cd in, which worked quite nicely, and detected everything. I partitioned it, and have hda1 for /boot (ext2), hda3 swap and hda4 / (ext3). (a 1.5GB partion (hda2) left over for either storage or windows, (depends on if wine plays Total Annihilation over the network, as it plays it fine without. :) ). Downloaded and untarred the stage1 tarball from 1.4rc4 (or rc3, I don't remember). Then followed the gentoo-x86-install guide.

Install went smoothly for the most part. GRUB DID NOT WORK, because it couldn't detect the bios drives, mirph. LILO on the other hand did work. after that it boots up and works fine.

Kernel: 2.4.20-gentoo (gentoo-sources)
vesafb (option passed to kernel: vga=791, to use the whole screen)

I am planning on getting kde and a development kernel to work, but as of yet (2-3 days after beginning gentoo install (compliling takes a bit of time)) have't. (2.5.68 didn't work well at all)

X (4.3.0) works nicely, and KDE (3.1.2) is very usable on this machine dispite being only 300MHz. (Ironic, I basically started out at a 350MHz machine many years ago and am now back to a 300MHz machine which works quite well.) It does take about 10-30 seconds to switch back to X from console, but other than that it works wonderfully.

The sound card lives on irq=5 io=0x220 and the sb module needs isapnp=0 passed to it: ex: insmod sb irq=5 io=0x220 isapnp=0 OR (using ALSA) snd-es18xx port=0x220 irq=5 isapnp=0

Problems:
Grub doesn't work.
Sometimes it just shuts down. Reason is currently unknown, and part of the reason for trying the development kernel, which has better apm/acpi support. (update: seems to have just been the battery not being in use.)