[mahmud]

Riiight, downloading individual packages, libraries and kernels and building them from source. Which is why I thought it would be a good exercise, however very boring.

Running a Bastille script on the box would give you a quick TODO list. Pushing it to "production" and getting a few servers up and running, across version incompatibilities, would prove a bit more interesting. Running it under an older 2.4.x or 2.2.x kernel, doubly so.