Ok, 

After some ranting and raving here how I plan to proceed.  I feel I may 
be in over my head compiling a kernal but... I feel I have few choices.  
As I've said here before I'm not a unix system person other than using it 
from time to time as a user.  I am very good at oldstyle hacking if need 
be but, I'd rather read the book first.  OH, I've bootstrapped z9- and 8086 
systems to operation in the old pre PC days so I can be creative.

What I have:

 Platform 1:
 
 I have a microvaxII with one RD54<159mb> and one RD53<71mb>.  The RD54
 has about 140,000  blocks free and the rd53 is empty tested and known
 good.  It has a DELQA, TK50.  The RD54 has VMS5.4-4 and decwindows
 tailored out and deleted for space on the rd54.  I also have VAX ansi-C
 on the RD54.  This is fully working debugged hardware.

 Platform 2:

 A vs2000 with RD53 with VMS on it and 6mb of memory.  It's been run,
 tested and net booted via VMS to assure it works using only the serial
 console.  I don't have a monitor for it, don't plan one either.  It also
 has the TZK50/tk50 for tape.  This, from what I've done is fully debugged
 and the RD53 with VMS can be overwritten at no loss. I also have a 140mb
 micropulos SCSI drive for it(known good).

What I do not have:

 Any other platform running any *nix.  There is a small chance I may be
 able to get ultrix vax.  No counting on that.

At this point I have know good hardware running known software reliably 
with an eithernet connection between them. Also importantly common media
in the form of RD53s, TK50s and eithernet.
  
By good fortune and someone elses effort I have a TK50 with BSD on it that I 
will try to load in the uVAX-II RD53.

Now after all that... before I do much else is there anything I need to
know going in?  Also At verying point I may have questions that could be 
trivial or really extreme and laughing is not an option.  ;-)


Allison