>OK, I get the hint - "switch to -current".

>I'm afraid I'm a little rusty at that whole process - is the kernel in
>ftp://ftp.NetBSD.ORG/pub/NetBSD/arch/sparc64/snapshot/20010114/binary/kernel/
>(dated January 14th) up-to-date enough to use as a jumping-off point?

FIW I'm happily running a 1.5Q kernel with 1.5 userland (plus the binary ld
update) and -current [g]awk on an ultra1.  Grabbing a semi-current kernel
helped me - since I was mounting the srcs via NFS.

If you have -current srcs handy you should be able to simply compile the 
kernel (need the fixed ld though).

--sjg