Another Ultima Linux Post: Laptop Story
I've gone and installed Ultima Linux on the Compaq Armada 7800 which I've named caspian.
Actually, I installed Ultima Linux on caspian twice. The first time I tried KDE and that was a mistake. KDE is nice, but it's just too much for a Pentium II. Too much candy, not enough speed. Since I'd not had all that much time invested in the install and didn't care to fiddle about with whatever Ultima (Slackware) requires to remove undesired packages I figured a quick re-install would be the fastest way to get what I wanted.
The F4 issue was still there, but other than that the install(s) went pretty much textbook perfect. CTRL-ALT-DEL to reboot worked. As caspian isn't just too old a machine, the pointer really is a PS/2 device and things just worked for the most part. I was glad I had one of the previous posts to refer to in order to take care of getting Xfce to act as I desired.
The one thing that I don't have working, or at least not working reliably, is wireless networking. I've not tried to use the built-in modem, so that could be another hassle if I ever need it. Wired networking (using a pcmcia card) worked fine, so it's not a pcmcia or general networking problem, at least.
I did find a page about setting up wireless networking in Slackware and it was somewhat useful. Somehow I got a wireless connection going, once. Just once. I took advantage of that to do a few things, but I likely should have done a few more when I had the chance.
The working wireless didn't survive a reboot and trying the same actions (I think) as earlier resulted in either nothing happening or in a screen rapidly scrolling over and over and over and things were pretty much locked up in that condition. Right now I'm assuming that I may have unintentionally broke something and need to fix it (I'd rather not do another install if I can help it). Also, I need to find out more about how Ultima or Slackware is configured for wireless so I can change the thing that needs changing only once and have things continue to work, at least on the same network. It's quite annoying and frustrating when a computer seems to behave in a non-deterministic manner.