After spend­ing to much time try­ing to jump from some mu­ti­lat­ed lin­ux in­stal­la­tion to some lat­est ker­nel I de­cid­ed to keep up with the patch­levels. Which means at one point I start­ed with 2.4.18bf from a net-in­stall and then man­aged to grad­u­al­ly up­grade it to the lat­est ver­sion. The big ad­van­tage is that it's eas­i­er to fig­ure out what went wrong with a small patch, while it's al­most im­pos­si­ble to re­alise what broke and how when big­ger steps are tak­en, even more when they are mixed with hard­ware changes. The trap of run­ning a serv­er is of course that you get in the habit of only re­boot­ing for a hard­ware up­grade, and then com­bine that up­grade with all the ac­cu­mu­lat­ed soft­ware and firmware up­grades that re­quire a re­boot. And then it's hard to find out what's to blame when things go wrong...

The pro­ce­dure is:

1. Get the in­cre­men­tal patch­es from ker­nel.org (not the non-in­cre­men­tal patch)
2. Run bz­cat ../patch-n.n.n.n-n+1.bz2 | patch -p1 in /usr/src/lin­ux
3. Fol­low the pack­ag­ing steps