Hey All, many thanks to those who gave advice on installing kernel 2.4 on my laptop. Turned out the problem was that I hadn't set the processor type in the kernel configuration...
Now a new difficult rears its ugly head. Apt-get is segfaulting under the new kernel. When I try (for example) apt-get install mpg123, the program segfaults immediately. Ditto with apt-get remove xxx Any ideas? Or methods of upgrading / correcting the faulty version of apt-get without using apt-get? Tiarnan