As far as I know you can. You must understand all distrobutions of Linux at the core are the same. (IE. They run a Linux kernel). Mandrake 7.1 looks to have been running a 2.2.17 or 2.2.18 kernel. I used to have a Debian Potato that ran 2.2.18 or .19 and it ran everything fine. What you might have to end up doing though is actually compiling stuff yourself rather than getting packages. So I would probably install everything from source not rpms.
Hope this helps!
