My goal is to make the leanest Slackware kernel possible for my machine specifically. I'm not exactly a newbie to unix, but I'm not an expert.
I tried this tutorial Chapter*18.*Building a kernel , but I would like something in more depth to really make a lean slack machine. Where should I go?
Cut out all the modules/drivers you don't need and you'll have a pretty close to minimal 2.6.x kernel.
The smallest kernel you can get is two megs and change, so there's no point obsessing; you won't make it significantly smaller or measurably faster. Besides, some "fluff" you can get rid of are things you actually want. Trust me, you'll be kicking yourself if you leave out /proc/config.gz support.
If you're going to do this, you might as well begin with updating to the latest kernel and see how that fits for you, then work it down little by little, keeping a couple of previous revisions and taking care to keep track of what you do in lilo.
Slackware has a pretty mean out of the box kernel anyway, it's not really polished up the way some/most distros do it, so you may be surprised that such a responsive kernel doesn't yield much in the way of results.
I'm interested in knowing what you tear out and keep so if you are inclined to track your progress here I'd enjoy monitoring your progress/benchmarks.