well, THAT didn't work.
After having spent half an hour reconfiguring my kernal and then an unknown ammount of time recompiling it (I wasn't about to sit around and wait, I just started it and left), I move it into position (along with all the various modules and mapfiles), reboot, and . . .
NOTHING!
#*%^*%#%#*
now I get to re-install. Oh well, I wanted to reconfigure the partitioning of the disk anyway. stoopid SuSE made it all one big partition, which we all know you shouldn't ever do. This time I'm playing with the LVM so I might be able to resize partitions and filesystems on-the-fly after this.