I don't know if this ranks up there with finding a 4 leaf clover, but nice to meet you ... similarly, my dabble with arch is now at about 9 months(?) I think; my intention is to truly live with this distro to make sure it gets a fair look-in, but that's a 2-way street - if the distro doesn't engage me then it is hard for me to commit; so far I'm liking arch a lot though I still lean to the granularity of gentoo's approach[/Off-topic]
[On-topic]
In answer to the original question, if kernel version is a must then you can run conky or gkrellm to display your version on *box or fvwm (or other wm) that don't have an 'about' panel/display
But in all honesty, why? We're using linux/*bsd - just pull up a terminal and punch in uname -a; not sure what version your DE/WM is? Use your GUI/CLI package manager to check for updates - the good ones let you know what you're running, if you have the latest, etc <-- that's not intended as a macho remark btw...[/On-topic]
[Off-topic...again]
I've responded to JP in a thread elsewhere that I don't see a need for him to go from (mainstream) kernel 2.6.24 to (not yet in repo) kernel 2.6.25 <-- definitely intended to demonstrate that I don't cull kodiak bears with my little toe before grabbing a yogi-steak for breakfast[/Off-topic...again]
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Arch64 :: Funtoo64 :: FreeBSD-8.0 :: OSX-10.4.11 (PPC)
Testing: Fedora12_x86-64 :: Ubuntu-10.04-LTS_x86-64