About the kernel not booting, I ran into some wierd problems earlier this week with kernels and compiler versions not matching up. I recently upgraded my machine to slackware 9.0 which uses gcc 3.2.2 throughout but my older kernel images (from floppy) were still the 2.95 ones and they would not boot at all and speakup began acting very strangely. All this came about for me because I did that *BIG* *BIG* mistake of compiling a new kernel, forgetting to run lilo, then reboot! Once I got back into that machine and updated lilo the new kernels have all worked great with either version of speakup. Oh, I just checked and devfs is not configured in for my kernels. Anyhow, since that day I haven't had any problems with my kernels booting, thank God. -- Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments. See http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
