Yeah, barbecuing kernels is my favorite hobby. Matter of fact they taste good too. I neglected to mention that I did poke about and it seems this ctype.h and other files that seem to be missing in the make dep process do exist. The handy find util found them and I'm not sure by looking at the Makefile etc. where its trying to find them. Seems that all is in order best I can tell, but obviously not. So, these things exist and the only thing I can think of is perhaps there's some syn links that need to be created. I haven't had to make these before, but then its been some time since I compiled a kernel on a Debian install. I assume it should be the same as any distro. Are there in fact links that need to be created? The kernel lives as linux-2.4.9 but I've created a sym link to linux which is normal procedure for me. thanks --- Scott Linux, when you need a real os.