Still getting kernel panic when compiling my own kernel

[Mariano Kamp <mkamp@gmx.de>]

Hi,

 I still haven't given up yet to compile my own kernel, but I am nearly
there. Meanhwile I removed the kernel and the kernel source packages and
installed them again. But even from the scratch without changing
anything I get a kernel panic from my compiled kernel. Aren't the
default settings being supposed to be the same as the standard kernel
shipped? The standard kernel is working though. 

  Problem is it doesn't support acpi out of the box and afaik I need
acpi if I don't want to burn the processor on this particular machine
(as described on linux-laptop.org).

  For the record .. I am using woody on a sony vaio grx316g.

  Btw. I also bought a null modem cabel to get the console messages from
the kernel before the panic, but unfortunately I found out that my
laptop has three usb, and firewire and ..., but not a serial port :-(
Are there any other ways to see the kernel messages? I believe that the
file system is not mounted at that point in time and probably because of
that I don't see any relevant messages below /var/log.

Cheers,
Mariano