I disabled OSS, rebuilt kernel, and now Alsa works. go figure?

Mouse started working by itself. I hate it when that happens. When I boot back to 2.4.33.3, I have to reconfigure mouse to get it to work, booting to 2.6.21.1 seems to reconfigure the mouse.

I enabled frame buffer support, VESA only. Didn't fix the blank display on boot. I enabled Framebuffer console support, and now the display works. Also, nVidia drivers install.

The last holdout seems to be my wireless nic. Belkin card, Atheros based. I built a madwifi slack package and installed it, but it didn't work. I still need to do some work on this before crying for help, but if anyone has any advice, I'm all ears

Hallo together,

if something works with your 2.4 Kernel and not with your 2.6 Kernel it would help to use (for example framebuffer) in the directory /usr/src/linux/2.4.33/ and in /usr/src/linux/2.6.xx/. This will help you to compare the different config-files for the kernels.
In the case that you have a correctly working 2.6 Kernel wich is to be updated, use "make oldconfig" wich only will ask you about new kernelfeatures.

Markus

madwifi are quite good drivers, I've used them, and they work great. There's a nice tutorial on their site and must support as well:

http://madwifi.org/wiki/UserDocs/FirstTimeHowTo

OSS is not much use anymore, it just messes things up. I don't compile it into any of my kernels.

Lesson of the day. Wireless doesn't work very well if you don't enable wireless extensions when you compile your kernel :-)

I removed madwifi, enabled wireless extensions, recompiled kernel, reboot, compile and install madwifi. Wooooo...we have internet!! We have sound, we have a console, we have nVidia drivers! We have a working 2.6.21.1 kernel! After a week or so of why-doesn't-this-work-hell, I have forgotten why I did this in the first place. I think because someone said Wine worked better with a 2.6 kernel....

I think I've finally learned enough about linux and compiling kernels that I can be official declared as dangerous :-)

welcome to the club, we'll have to get you a t-shirt and show you the secret handshake.. :P