You get: Some crappy kernel highlighted when your compy boots so you have to babysit it so you don't boot to your kernel from Redhat 5.1 Solution: Step 1: Identify your bootloader. You're likley running either lilo or grub. Use "whereis" to figure out which bootloaders (possibly both) are installed pizza@ds05:~$ whereis lilo lilo: pizza@ds05:~$ whereis grub grub: /sbin/grub /usr/share/grub /usr/man/man8/grub.8.gz /usr/share/man/man8/grub.8.gz I only have grub installed, so I must be using grub. If it looks like both are installed, check for the extistence of /boot/grub/grub.conf It that is there, then you're using grub. Otherwise, lilo. Note that you may have to mount your boot partition to /boot for it to show up. pizza@ds05:~$ df -h|grep boot /dev/hda1 69M 54M 12M 83% /boot If you don't see an entry, then you'll need to: `mount /dev/whatever /boot` as root, in my case and in most cases the device should be /dev/hda1 GRUB: Open /boot/grub/grub.conf as root. There should be a line that says "default n" where n is an integer Change that to the kernel entry you want to boot. the "default" is 1-based, so the second kernel will be "default 2", as opposed to "default 1" for a 0-based scheme That's it Lilo: Open /etc/lilo.conf as root. Look for a line starting with "default=" Change Save /etc/lilo.conf Run "lilo" as root Done! Verify: Reboot. vim: set ts=8: