Buildroot barfing, can't find linux kernel Makefile?

I just grabbed the CVS tarball of buildroot, untarred it, read the README, ran 
the cvs login line in it via cut and paste, and fired up make.  The system in 
question is Red Hat 8 on a toshiba laptop (x86).  Watched it happily build 
binutils or some such, and then went and made a sandwich.  When I came back, 
it said:

elif [ "i386" = "cris" ];then \
    ln -fs asm-cris asm; \
else ln -fs asm-i386 asm; \
fi)
cp /usr/src/linux/Makefile /home/landley/uclibc/buildroot/build/linux/
cp: cannot stat `/usr/src/linux/Makefile': No such file or directory
make: *** [/home/landley/uclibc/buildroot/build/linux/.configured] Error 1
[landley@driftwood buildroot]$

Now I could easily untar the linux-kernel source into /usr/src/linux, but I 
haven't actually PUT the linux kernel source into /usr/src/linux in a number 
of years (it's in my home directory, where it belongs. :), and I'm just 
curious what the heck it's trying to do.  (.config I could understand, but 
why does it want the Makefile?)

I did the minimum possible configuration the first time, intentionally.  If 
there's somethign else I should do that the README didn't say to do, could 
somebody let me know what it is, and maybe add it to the README?

Google was uninformative here...

Rob
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