I can tell you why cups is like his now.

Printing to a file is considered a big security risk.

CUPS has been bought by Apple now, its a wholly owned everything of Apple. Even Sweet is now an employee.

There are a huge amount of changes that went into Etch v4.0 vs Sarge v3.1. Namely UDEV and HAL were completely re-written and many "done deals" were thrown out and had to be re-done. I hope you also documented how disk drives and be re-ordered arbitrarily.

There are also many things about NFS that were done in preparation for v4 that didn't actually make it in time for final builds.

And why a kernel recompile? You have effectively lost any security updates or huge bug fixes for it.

I's have to ask which install disk you used as well. CD1 (GNOME, KDE or XFCE) or the Net-install?

. . was from the full 21-CD stable set, but apt-get update was run before installing the kernel source - a new kernel source was automatically downloaded from Debian and installed by apt-get install. A couple other packages were also downloaded. All the installing I did used CDs 1,4,5,10 and possibly 2 from the set so copies of those will be shipped with the machine.

I rebuilt the kernel because I never let a machine out without the ability to do so. My work often involves hardware that isn't installed by the distribution and/or configurations that are different. And there can be hardware changes later.

And if you haven't thoroughly reconfigured and rebuilt the kernel, do your really know and understand your machine?

In any case my .config is half the size of the distribution, my initrd is 1/4 the size and my kernel is a few k larger because I built in some drivers that had been modules.

In the past I've always built to boot without an initrd but that seems impractical now.

As for printing to a file, one of the software VARs I set up machines for requires the default printer to print to /dev/nul so it's not an option.

I did have a bit of trouble with NFS but not a lot. I notice Samba now actually requires users to be in the Linux group specified so force group isn't as convenient as it once was. I also noticed OS/2 works better with the Etch Samba than it did with the Sarge Samba.

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