I've actually had to do some work this week, so not too much on the hacking front.
Beat up framebuffer and it still won't work on the laptop. Seems that the ATI Mach64 chipset in the laptop is not properly supported, I just get a blank screen. Everything else continues working, so I'm listening to the harddrive so I can work out when it has finally booted and is at a login prompt to be able to reboot and go back to a regular kernel. This is annoying because mplayer won't scale the image on regular x11 output.