comedi/rtlinux3.2/OS configuration management

Can someone help? I am trying to triangulate on a hardware platform / Linux distribution / kernel release that supports both RTLinux and Comedi.

I had previously been happy using the RTLinux 3.1 patch to a 2.4.4 kernel, but recently I found that I needed to upgrade the OS (for the latest autoconf/automake/libtool, etc) to support the latest Comedi releases.

Starting with a blank hard drive, I installed the Fedora Core 1 distribution and that allowed me to use the latest Comedi CVS very well, however it has caused me problems finding a good RTLinux patch to use.

I downloaded the RTLinux3.2-pre3 patches from rtlinux-gpl.org and tried several different approaches so far unsuccessfully:

applied 2.4.22-rtlinux3.2-pre3 patch to 2.4.22 kernel (downloaded from www.kernel.org)
applied 2.4.21-rtlinux3.2-pre3 patch to 2.4.21 kernel (also from kernel.org)

In both cases my system crashes during the rtlinux regression test. I also tried reconfiguring the linux kernel switching MTRR and the APM BIOS support (off) as recommended in the installation docs. 

I even had extra problems with the hardware platform since I had originally tried using  a Dell Optiplex GX260 P4 for the target, and discovered all the issues surrounding the Intel845 graphics chipset causing trouble, so I switched to a Dell Dimension P3 target for the linux OS installation - that seems to work well - at least for running the plain non-rtl linux OS.

Can anyone help me recommending a Linux distribution/RTLinux patch/Comedi combination (and maybe even specific hardware target) that works for them?

Alex