Thanks for the pointers, Oli and Martijn. Indeed, the Ubuntu kernel howto is where I started but it lacked the depth I needed. I'll need to study the official debian kernel package guide to see if it's better than what I'm doing now, though. I just now figured out the silly mistake that was causing make-kpkg fail for me. I had assumed that kernel-img.conf was used by make-kpkg to roll the .deb, but instead it's used by dpkg -i on the target machine for installing the .deb. I did not have kernel-img.conf on the target machines. D'oh! So now it comes down to either packaging kernel-img.conf with a kernel, which would actually be kind of nice since it's a pretty intuitive way to tweak kernel install options without tearing apart a .deb, or see if there's an easy way to bake the presettings for non-interactive installation into the .deb. Thanks again!