2. Besides that, the machine has a built-in soundcard (works fine under
   Win95 using some ESS1680(?) sounddriver, but it's not recognized by the
   GENERIC kernel. Here's what dmesg says:
	The ESS chips have a SoundBlaster compatible mode. Something's
wrong if your kernel doesn't find a sb0 device, since sb0 is in
GENERIC. The sb mode of the ESS chips isn't up to the full capabilites
of the chip (no 16-bit modes, for example), but it works.

   3. The machine has a touchpad as mouse-replacement, the Win* driver says
   something about Synaptics(?).  Any chance about that?

	The Synaptics touchpad will, by default, pretend to be a PS/2
mouse device. The PS/2 mouse driver isn't in the GENERIC kernel (why?
I don't know. Maybe it breaks some systems?), but building a kernel
with pms0 enabled should let you use the touchpad normally, including
"tapping" for clicking. The relevant lines from the XF86Config on my
NEC Versa 2405 (running 1.2G) with a Synaptics touchpad are:

Section "Pointer"
   Protocol        "MouseSystems"
   Device          "/dev/pms0"
   BaudRate        1200
   SampleRate      91
   Emulate3Buttons
EndSection

	- Nathan