So it took me some time, and I'm not even at the end yet, but up to now I've quite enjoyed the mind puzzle posed by the combination of

• a new bunch of hardware,
• debian sarge,
• building a 2.6.8 linux kernel and
• my greenhorn status in all of this...

The things this game offered me:

• first tricking round the watchdog (rmmod i810-tco),
• then straight on to apt-getting all kind of stuff required for kernel building,
• with the help of make menuconfig through the miriad of kernel-config options,
• combing through them once again, and again, and ...
• experiencing the sudden insight that compared to 2.4 the new kernel would take /dev/sda in stead of /dev/hda to talk about it's main drive,
• through the additional network-cable unmystifying the switching-between-kernel-versions-network-cards (eth0 <> eth1)
• and finally opening the gate to nirvana through installing the devfsd which is required if devfs support is in the kernel...

Yeah, never a dull moment! But I admit, I'm lucky to have found an excelent dynamically cooperating cheat-sheet. Thx again, mate!