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I was offered help compiling kernels and mplayer.

Kernel 2.2.27 (Jan 12 2005 is the latest patch to 2.2.26 of 2004) has a 
few bug fixes and 'nomce' by default.  Both my Compaq Armada laptops, 120 
and 233MHz, won't boot with 2-floppy BL3.50 because it has mce not nomce 
by default.  Someone would need to remake the first disk to add 'nomce' to 
lilo.  (How difficult is that?).

Can you use standard BL3.50 modules 
insmod -f module.o.

I want to make two PI kernels:

1)  A small one for 2-floppy BL3:

without SYSCTL - this makes a /proc/sys - what do we need it for?
without SYSVIPC - used by dosemu
with VFAT built-in, used to copy Win98 files between hard drives, 
and also to copy long-named linux files to DOS floppy disks.

Are the first two really needed?

2) a laptop kernel (loop or ext2), without the above, and with vesafb, 
which works with "chips and technology" video (Toshiba, Hitachi) and 
neomagic (Dell, Gateway, IBM) video chips, even ones that crash Xvesa. 
It gives full-screen nice looking text in 800x600, with higher refresh 
rate (irrelevant for LCD screens) and works with tiny-X server xfbdev 
(1MB).  Needs /dev/fb0.

Any ideas or requests for other changes to the current kernel?

xfbdev and the vesafb kernel add about 100K each so something might need 
to go on a third floppy disk for a floppy version, which I will not 
attempt right now.  I could leave out VGA console support and use 
framebuffer instead, but that uses 60K more memory while saving 30K disk 
space.  Omitting loop would save some space, also games and man pages.

Sindi Keesan