> On a possibly slightly related note, I took the weekend (Jan 23/99)
> weekly tar-balls home on a CD-R last night and built a GENERIC kernel
> on my PC164SX which died in a similar fashion (machine trap/panic just
> after the vga attach line (something like "wscons at vga0")).  I've

Of couse after wasting the bandwidth with my msg, removing the S3 based
video card allowed me to proceed.  I got something about missed interrupt
on the PCI-ISA bridge but I've no ISA cards so don't know whether it would
lead to trouble.  I was able to rebuild the full system, then X and finally
a variety of pkg's - alas pkg_create would core-dump about every 3rd pkg
but that at least didn't appear to interfer with the pkg being installed...

-- Ken