Best practices to get latest software on new install

I'm going to be doing an FTP install of SUSE 9. I had it running very well on an older machine, but now that I have a newer one I want to put it on there. I want to install SUSE and through apt-get/synaptic, get the latest software (i.e. KDE 3.2) installed on the machine. In addition I'd like to run the latest version of the 2.6 kernel on the machine. Am I better off doing a very minimal FTP install, and then using apt-get to get the later versions of software? As for the kernel, could someone provide a resources as to the steps needed (I suppose I'll use lilo as the boot manager) to ensure that the new kernel is installed successfully? Sorry for 2 questions, but they are somewhat related to the initial install. Thanks.