nope, i downloaded a stock 2.4.20 kernel from a site in finland as per your instructions. i think my problems before might have been because i have never tried to compile a kernel with anything other than mandrake sources. i was walked through a red hat recompile on red hat 7.0 back when it was new, and it worked but that doesn't really count.
as for where i put the ln stuff, at the top
of /etc/rc.d/rc.modules like you said. but the thing is, it appears to work fine, which it wouldn't do if it really wasn't recognising ln, isn't that right? maybe i should stick it in rc.local instead?