I installed Woody (the “stale” release) on my Inspiron 8200 and followed both the link mentioned below and Stephan Wehrheims Instructions and got a running system fairly soon. After compiling the kernel (and flipping options rand^h^h^h^h with care and deliberation) I was left with a kernel that booted but didn’t have network connection. The ping command claimed: sendto: Network not reachable. Digging around on Google convinced me that my kernel compilation experiments had gone astray. After some consultation with working .config files, I ended up with this file:

/usr/src/linux/.config

that gives me a booting kernel that has network support.