I feel very proud of myself having taken the first stage away from "newbie-dom" and successfully compiled my first kernel. Thanks to all who gave advice - especially Richard and Frank. I now have RH5.0 with 2.0.34 so I can mount my FAT32 partition - a feature which will help me make the transition from windoze to Linux. I tried the patches again - my first go was met only with error messages. This time I still got errors, but it did some of the patching. So I decided to dump that idea and install a new source tree from a 5.1 disk (kernel 2.0.34) and compile from there. My new kernel image is about 65k smaller than the old one! (In case anyone is wondering why I didn't upgrade to RH 5.1, I thought that this was wimping out and that a competent Linux user should learn how to recompile a new kernel). Thanks to all, Martin
