hey there, im trying to install a new kernel that ive compiled. but, where do I find a *.img file for the kernel ? And is it nesissary to reference this in the grub.conf ?

k I'm doing the same thing at the moment.
Image is in arch/i386/boot
edit grub.conf so you can choose which kernel to use (in case new kernel does not work)

Whether this is necessary depends on your system configuration. An initrd image (the .img files to which you refer) is necessary if you wish to make available to the kernel some modules which is requires before it has loaded the normal root filesystem. For example (this is a silly hypothetical example), one might have ext3 filesystem support compiled as a module, but wish to use an ext3 root filesystem. In this case, there would be something of a chicken-and-egg problem, which would be solved by the creation of an initrd image containing the appropriate driver module.

Basically, try it without any initrd image referenced in grub, and if you have problems then you should know that initrd images are created using the "mkinitrd" tool.