[Q] Once it's all loaded up, I want to optimize the kernel for the machine (4
meg ram for the moment). Any suggestions as to what to add/delete

[A] You almost certainly want the PCMCIA stuff and the APM patch. Other than
the obvious things, you may want to use only (say) 4 rather than the normal 8
virtual terminals.

[Q] I'm hoping that I see a significant speed improvement when I switch from
the UMSDOS filesystem to EXT2 and when I compile a smaller kernel. Does anyone
have a pointer to the Kernel sources w/ APM support? I want to set one up with
APM & IDE but no PCMCIA, as I don't use my PCMCIA slot and I need to save &
swap.

[A] You should consider to comment out starting of klogd, syslogd, lpd, update,
crond and sendmail daemons from rc.* files from /etc/rc.d/ directory (of course
only if each of them ain't mandatory to you).

Also you should consider to configure kernel to use only say 2 virtual consoles
+ the one which is allocated for X. Point is that every single process in Linux
requires 40 kB of non swapable memory. By doing all described above you will
get 440 kB more pure hard RAM! And by recompiling Slackware's kernel with
minimum options you will get ca 80 kB more! So, I'm sure you will be amazed
when you get this half megabyte of static stuff off.