David Laight wrote:

>>1) why are man.tgz and misc.tgz in the i386 iso 0-size files?
> 
> Dunno - they are built ok under current on my development system.
> Maybe something failed in whatever the auto-build stuff does.

$ md5sum i386cd.iso;cat MD5|grep i386cd.iso
3ed779f70721415a03f327f265c98e6e *i386cd.iso
MD5 (i386cd.iso) = 3ed779f70721415a03f327f265c98e6e

inside the iso, man.tgz and misc.tgz are 0 size.  (just posting this to 
confirm the error on the list)

>>3) why would the GENERIC kernel see chown/chgrp binaries as shell scripts?
> 
> Where did you steal the binaries from?
> They might be dynamic and pull in /usr/lib/libc.so.12
> Then the 'exec' would fail and the shell treat them as scripts.

i took them from /usr/bin and /usr/sbin, so you're probably right.