Migrating kernel 2.4.18-bf2 -> 2.6

[Jean-Rene David <jrdavid@magma.ca>]

I have been using kernel 2.4.18-bf2 since my first
debian install about 2 years ago. Earlier this
week I upgraded to sarge and all went smoothly.

Now I'm trying something which should apparently
be pretty simple:

$ aptitude install kernel-image-2.6-686

But it fails. I get:

[...]
Setting up kernel-image-2.6.8-2-686 (2.6.8-16) ...
/usr/sbin/mkinitrd: line 1281: cd: initrd: No such file or directory
Failed to create initrd image.
[...]

I posted the complete 'script' session here:
http://home.magma.ca/~jrdavid/kernel-install.txt

Some details:

$ uname -a
Linux princo.homelinux.org 2.4.18-bf2.4 #1 Son Apr 14 09:53:28 CEST 2002 i686 GNU/Linux

$ cat /etc/apt/apt.conf
// /etc/apt/apt.conf - Configuration file for apt package management
// system.
//
// See man apt.conf(5) for more details

APT::Default-Release sarge;
APT::Cache-Limit "16777216";

$ cat /etc/debian_version
testing/unstable

[I don't know why this says testing/unstable since
I just upgraded to sarge. It should say 'stable'.
Right?]

In fact, while I'm at it, I posted the output of
dmesg after bootup at:

http://home.magma.ca/~jrdavid/dmesg.txt

Any help appreciated.

-- 
JR