I spent some hours upgrading Isengard, my laptop, to the latest 2.4 and 2.6 kernels. I never had any luck with the 2.6 kernels, as hardly anything worked, so I didn't expect much of the new 2.6.3 kernel. But lo and behold : I got a decent framebuffer screen at boot. I noticed some progress with the 2.6.2 kernel, where I barely saw some text scrolling by, but 2.6.3 has everything running smoothly. Except for my Xircom PCMCIA card, which freezes the laptop, but that seems to be a bug in the driver. Tomorrow, I'll give a patch a run, and see if that will solve the problem.