I successfully followed (most) of the compile guide in the sticky, but all that is happening with the system now is it gives the first message BIOS blah blah blah.. and then it boots to a screen that's blank and does nothing. taken out any vga references in lilo.conf so it'd just use the default (or do I really need to change it to vga=normal ?) anyway.. I'll try that next but right now I'm just using the cd to boot with linux mount root=/dev/hda7 (thanks for the person earlier who gave me that command when I didnt need it.. it's quite useful)...

anyway.. I ran menuconfig before compiling the kernel and told it to have support for console mode drivers (so that it could have the small text onload).. so I"m pretty sure what it should need is there, but of course it isn't doing anything.. now off to try something else and hopefully if it doesn't work I can get some help here.. thanks
(posting because I'm pretty much certain it won't work)

well.. heh.. iw as wrong it's working but there are still some errors coming up.. but i'm in X now (fluxbox) so.. all is .. mostly well, and ntfs compile support was apparently successful also.. hehe.
now just to figure out how to install the darn radeon when it keeps giving me all these dependencies I'm not sure how to resolve yet with this as swaret doesn't seem to get them when I update upgrade install, etc.

um.. and now I noticed that even though in console I can browse my ntfs drive xmms won't go there for some reason.. ehh..

EDIT: ok.. well I can't browse there when I'm not root.. how do I fix that? perhaps that's the root problem. heheh..

EDIT2: well I got there by using root console and typing xmms to load the program and was able to get the song loaded.. then realized that my sound card hasn't been working (haven't had anything to test it with yet).. it says /dev/dsp is not found.. it's a Sound Blaster Audigy.. now I need to do a search on why that isn't autodetected..

Try alsaconf to recognize your soundcard.
Add the option umask=000 in your /etc/fstab, on the line of your ntfs partition, like:
/dev/hdb1 /mnt/hd ntfs auto,rw,users,umask=000 1 2
then you could access it as normal user. Perhaps someone can indicate another way to do it?

I really should have posted that I got this working.. but now I'm having another (odder) problem with sound so eh. Basically that day I didn't know I needed to compile support for the emu10k1 into the kernel. Did that and things worked fine. Now, the problem is that whenever I try to run kde it's killing sound (sound works on fluxbox, but once I start kde it just dies out).

But really, this problem is bigger than that.. and I'm going to have to post another thread.. I think it has to do with swaret.. which is becoming a real pain..

I'm not sure if swaret is to blame and I'm sure it could be something I'm doing wrong.. but only because of ignorance and a lack of intuitiveness on swarets part if that's the case. I was really liking the ease of using swaret.. but apparently it can break things big time..

very bad..